Hi Peter, I do definitely want to support assigning different materials to different surfaces within one NURBS object.

That's an area of "object properties" which will probably be a slightly different area than layers/grouping, like probably there will be an "Object properties" panel for editing things like materials assigned to an object, and the grouping/layering/organizing type list is likely to be a separate UI panel.

I'm not quite sure yet how this will relate to UV mapping specifically yet though.

- Michael