For the level I'm scripting, the pelican needs an extra marker for the gun turret. So I loaded the model, imported the vertex weights (whatever those are). I notice that if I didn't, the skin modifier wouldn't show up and the model wouldn't animate properly.

So, when I DID import the vertex weights, I still had a problem: only 2 of the 11 materials would be imported. So I had to go in and assign each mesh element to the appropriate material. took a very long time. I had to use trial-and-error to see if I chose correctly.

I have several questions regarding this:

1.) Is there a way to successfully import all the material ID's?
2.) How can I set up the textures in the material library properly (all the tutorials I saw were pretty basic on that part)
3.) This question may answer itself if the second question is answered: how do I assign a segment of a bitmap to the selected mesh? (I've only seen it done for simple plane objects, not cone-like objects like the pelican's hover thrusters)

Thanks in advance to those who take the time to answer some (or all) of these questions.