you most certainly can. use a multi/sub material and you can add as many different variations of the texture as you want. then go to the modify tab and click on select by polygon, face, or element. then select the part of the model that you'd like to set the subtexture for. Lastly, under "surface properties" go to Set ID: and set it to the number of the subtexture that you want to apply.

see attached picture

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Dave

"I came! I slept! I went home!"

assigning different materials to different polygon selections is probably the easiest method. certainly in the case of a ship where there are clearly defined sections, but in a situation where you want to use a continuous mesh with different materials across the surface such as say a face with skin on one side and shiny reflective metal on the other. Once you have the uvs you can paint a black and white mask in photoshop to use as a mask in a blend material.
That way you can have a very specific blend between the two materials that isnt limited to different polygon selections.

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Thanks for your replies.

I'm not sure if I'm doing it right, but does this mean I must have the deck as one material ID, and the sides as another? Because apparently my model was already set in different material ID's, and whenever I try to exit the uvw unwrap modifier I get a "dependent on topology" warning. If I ignore this, and change the ID's to what I want, the current textures are all becoming a mess.


Edit:
Seems to work now! I'm not exactly sure why, but I scrapped my old material and made a new one and went from there following the instructions Thanks a bunch.

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