Quick question - can anyone explain how V-Ray interprets "smoothed normals"?

I was under the impression that this was just a way to clean up the appearance of edges in the Sketchup viewer, but V-Ray seems to honor these smoothed normals.

EXAMPLE:

I'm in the process of going through my model collection and splitting symmetrical models into 2 components (mirrored) to reduce file sizes. Now I'm realizing these new seams are visible in renderings.

Any options to have v-ray smooth all normals by default and ignore the sketchup settings?

Hello,
I've been researching this all morning and cannot find any direction. Maybe it's not possible.
Vray for Sketchup offers lens effects, but some of the properties (bloom masks, glare masks) require a Material ID. The problem is that this is an integer and not a color. I cannot figure out where to set this for the material. Also it seems like the "intensity" option under the masks do not work. I'm trying to set the glare effect to only work on certain emissive, and not others.

I know adding this in post is possible in alternate software, and I can achieve those effects, but I'm trying to see if it's possible with vray's lens effects.

Any ideas would be great!

Note: The service pack 3 for vray was released and states this under bug fixes "Altered how the Material ID and Node ID render channels work, they should have been integer channels instead of color." I have this service pack, and cannot figure out how to set the integer.