ow mate you DONT have to split an object up to make new mats on it, just select the polys you want a dif mat on click the new material button then click asssign (need to load one mat first sorta as a base) that works in both BI and cycles but from BI you can bake a texture map. Not gonna say uv mapping is the best way to do stuff but does give pretty much the same result whatever app you render in