First of all, I'd just like to say, Amazing program! I downloaded this a few days ago and I am so thrilled with how easy it is to use. Kudos!

I have a few questions about my first stab at modeling, I was hoping someone would be able to take a look at it and give me some advice / tips.

My whole intent for this program is to be able to take things that I render in MoL and import them into Sketchup to be rendered with Podium (a rendering plugin for sketchup).

Originally, I had selected the entire model and ran a boolean union command so that I could fillet all of the pieces. However, when I import the filleted version of this model into sketchup, it comes in as one big component, not allowing me to select separate areas to texture. When I explode it, it explodes into something like 6000 separate polys. I've tried exporting it as a 3DS file as well as an OBJ using a sketchup ruby script. It its current non filleted state that I provided for your use, I am able to import it into sketchup and the program recognizes it as 34 separate groups that are easy to texture.

Ideally, I would like to be able to easily texture this creation with a different color for the body, face, and various colors for the spikes. I'm not sure if there are some techniques that I should be using or some command in MoL that I should be utilizing or, if it is simply a shortcoming of the the program that I am importing the model into. Right now, if I apply the fillets and import into sketchup, I find myself individually selecting each face that needs to be textured. This is extremely tedious and I feel that I am missing some easy solution. If there is something like the magnetic lasso tool in photoshop that could allow me to easily texture only certain parts of the geometry I would like to know.

If there is another free program that could be used to render and texture that is at the ease of use level of sketchup and MoL I would appreciate your recommendations as well. I checked out a list of renderers but the few that seemed promising are pay to play.

Thanks for any help that you can give!