I am making a skateboard, I want to have different materials and textures on the bottom, middle and top of the skateboard. I want to have a picture on the bottom, a grip tape with bumpmap on the top and wood inbetween. Any help would be grately appreciated
You can assign different material to the same mesh however, rather than trying to explain it here, search through the tutorials list for tuts on materials. I believe there is one on this topic.
I have also been making a skateboard (post is somewhere in WIP forum) and I have been wondering how this would be possible. I have not worked on it since I hit this obstacle. I’ll do a search. Thanks. 
When you want to apply new textures or materials to a mesh which already has a texture/mat applied do the following:-
Enter EDIT mode for the mesh you wish to work on. If your board is made up of joined meshes, select one vert from the object you wish to apply the new mat/texture to, then whilst holding the mouse over another vert of the same object press L, this will select all verts of the object.
If you have one mesh only, use the B button to select the verts you want to colour.
Then in the EDIT buttons, on the left handside, you will see the ‘Mat’ button, with a 1 and a 1 either side of it. I call this the Material Stack, I’m unsure of it’s correct name.
Press the light brown ‘NEW’ button just below.
The ‘Mat’ button now has 2 either side of it. This means you are now affecting the mesh with the second of 2 mats.
Now go to the material buttons, and delete link to the material, then create a new material.
Change this mat as you wish, (add textures etc) then retuirn to the EDIT buttons. Below the ‘NEW’ button you pressed earlier, there is a light brown ‘ASSIGN’ button. Press this to assign the new mat to the selected verts.
You can repeat this process for up to 15 different materials per mesh.
If you wish to edit a different material in the stack, left click on the numbers that appear next to MAT in the edit buttons. The left hand number always represents the total number of materials in the stack, and the right number indicates which material you are affecting.
You just select the mat then move back to the Mat buttons. You can also move between mats in a stack in the same way in the material buttons.
A tip if you are using lots of picture textures, change the main colour sliders, as this is represented in the material stack, by a small box of the same colour, and it can get confusing when they are all grey.
Hope this is of some help,
Sonix.
This is a great help. I’m glad this was asked. I’ll definately try it. Thanks 
yep it is this way you do complex model in little part. Then give them ther material an after that do a join mesh. try this, the material section is splited automaticaly in two but remenber each portion of the mesh you put in material group must have is own material, that suppose you select one groupe then add/select a material for it then select the next group and do the same.
I just forget it some time so…
this is an example i did for one of my scene
the glave:
www.netconnexion.ca/~gbeloin/elysiun/glave.blend
(edit)
that gave me the idea of using it to mimic some translucent object.
FOr example i did a hole in that plane:
so i can even color that hole. like a window.
this is a nice tip
You guys should read the posts in general more often. 
I have explained this process at least 3 times in this subforum alone. You know you can really learn aLOT from reading this particular subforum. 