I kept rendering weird black spots and having freezes occurring during the process. It turns out that if my model had overlapping edges, orphaned points, or some other flaw, the light hitting the model could exceed 1 (0 being complete darkness, 1 being the absolute brightest bright).  Instead of functioning like a camera where portions would be washed or blown out, Lightwave interprets it as an unknown and refuses to render it at all. Voilà.—irregular and quite prolific black blobs.

So imagine the frustration when a new problem cropped up after rendering this time.  No matter what I tried, my textures were not looking right in brightness, color saturation, or (in the case of inverted normals) they seemed not to apply at all. 

It turns out that when I passed my model back and forth between Substance Painter and Newtek Lightwave, the model itself grew each time. It was now measuring approximately 720km long. Woah. So it’s interesting to note that Lightwave not only tries to keep the texture effects in proportion to the object, but it also has a limit to how high a texture can be made before the mesh falls apart. Or at least it does in regards to Terran lighting conditions. Definitely a lot to learn.