Hi Will. I don't know anything about Lightwave, but i imagine it's very similar to Modo. If you export from MoI with unwelded edges. Then you should be able to select the polygons for each surface by selecting all contiguous polygons. In Modo, it's simply a double click...

Would be useful for many people to have material assignments per face, especially if MoI will eventually tie directly into an external render engine. Rhino 4 has a "per face" material assignment as a hidden test command. It's not a fully developed command yet (V5 probably), but it's easy to see the benefit of not breaking your solids for the purpose of mapping regions...

jonah