Hi,
i am trying to get the chess board done. But i don’t really know how to get the alternate black and white color. Can anyone help me out? If i do to planes seperately and color one black and the other white and then join them both, the entire thing is turning black.
Thnx :spin:
I’m not sure the nature of your problem. Not quite sure what you mean by planes and color turning black. If the .blend file is small enough, consider attaching to the newsgroup with detailed descriptions on how to recreate the problem and what it was that you intended to happen. I am attaching a .blend file for a chess board that I just got working that uses only two real squares/planes and the rest are array duplicates.
(Hmmm … just realized that I can’t seem to attach blend files to a newsgroup posting … … here it a link to a copy I placed on the web)
Just subdivide a plane into 64 (?) sections (W-> subdivide multi 8 num of cuts) and then select every other square and then go to the Link and Materials panel and hit “New” under < 0 Mat 0 > and create a new material in the Shading (F5) context something like “Black” . Then go back to Link and Materials and hit “Assign” . now the entire plane will go black because you do not have another material linked to the mesh … So just go to the 3D header and from Select -> Inverse and then go back to Link and Materials panel and hit New again and go make a new material, “White” in the Shading context and then go back to Link and Materials and hit “Assign” … And you have your checkerboard pattern … and now you know how to assign multiple materials to a single mesh object 
thanks a lot Vertex Pusher, that really helped! 
I also came across another possibility. There is a “plugin” texture called “tiles” that creates alternating colored squares … exactly like a chess board. One could create a plane of the size one wants and then texture it with the tiles plugin.
See: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Texture_Plugins