Texture a cylinder with a wheels images

If you create a cylinder within B3D, can you identifiy the top and the bottom of the cylinder via code, and likewise identify the cylindrical/circular walls of the cylinder as child entities ? The reason is I would like to apply the following images to the respective sides of a cylinder:

Hub_cap_image: apply to the 'top' of a cylinder
inside_wheel_image: apply to the 'inner' of a cylinder
tyre_tread_image: apply to the 'circumference' of the cylinder

I think I can make a cylinder, give the cylinder child entities within Ultimate Unwrap 3D then import the 3d mesh to Blitz 3D with a view to achieving the above - but does anyone know how to achieve the above programmtically within Blitz 3D, i.e. assigning child entities to specific faces of a cylinder without having to use UU3D?

Thanks in advance, BP.

Why would you use 3 textures instead of one?
You can use one image that you can use as texture, and when creating the vertices, give them the correct UV coordinates (X-Y coordinates that define where the vertex is located on the texture).

Then you have one object with one texture, instead of 3 objects with their seperate texture (resulting in 3 textures).
That would increase framerate if you have multiple wheels on your screen.

Thanks PowerPC603, I'll research how to create one image with the relevant textures on it. Thanks for the advice about my approach of using 3 separate images dragging down the frame rate. After your advice I found this:

http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=44300

Which seems to provide the kind of guidance I need.

You have UU. What to do is create a cylinder in UU and look at how the UV map is laid out. What you would then do, is export the UVmap outline, import this map into a paint package or photoshop type package, and draw over the outlines.

Then create a material in UU and apply this to the mesh. That should give you what you want.

@Ross C, thankyou for the extra info. This helps a lot as I just discovered that Latatoy is using spheres for his wheels in conjunction with the JV-ODE physics library, which was posing some extra questions about whether I should continue to use a cylinder for the wheels or a eliptical (squished) sphere, which really is what a 'true' wheel is. I will use a cylinder in the first instance to improve my 3d texturing skills associated with UU3D, then consider addressing using spheres for wheels as opposed to cylinders to combat the potential skipping problem.