Simple question - separating a mesh that's all 1 piece into segments

[subgeniuszero]

Hey all.

I'm sure this is covered in the Maya documentation somewhere, though I can't find it.  Relatively simple question, though.  I've constructed a mesh that's all one piece (Maya says it cannot be "separated" because of this), but want to segment into several different pieces.  How do I do this?  Is it simply a matter of selecting the polygons/verticces/etc, and then choosing a menu option somewhere?  Basically, what I've got is a suit of armor that I modeled as all ONE big piece, but now I need to cut it into its components — arms, elgs, torso, etc.  So how do I do this?

Thanks,
Andy H.
subgeniuszero@me.com 

[farago]

http://www.uvlayout.com/
Think they have a 30 day trial.

May seem a bit arcane but it's very powerful.

[dayyans]

UV layout does have a free trial and it is awesome! But I think Andy you want to separate the actual polygons from each other right. One workflow might be to create quick selection sets for each segment then use Edit Mesh>Duplicate faces

[myara]

Select the polygons you want to extract and then [Mesh \ Extract], Clear History after that.

If you are using a really old Maya version, then use the popular script Detatch And Separate.