I could have sworn I posted this with my phone…

I got the things working correctly. Don’t instance the object itself, instance a group the proxy is a child of. Why this works is a mystery. But I once had a lecturer many years ago tell me that the golden rule of Maya is “If it doesn’t work, group it.”

Seems the dude was right 🙂

On another note – I’ve been working on a really fun project recently. When I say fun I mean fun technically. I’ve pulled out all my tricks using rayswitching, blurring the HDRI per Mia_Material_X shader, throwing area lights at everything and getting their stuff smooth, hell even getting geometry to light up using the mia_light_surface shader… NOT the builtin_light one, that sucks (for now). And it is looking VERY nice. I may post an image or two later once the project is over. We’ll see.