It seems like it should be such a basic and easy thing but I can't find out how to do this. I have a single piece model of a dinosaur (who doesn't these days) and I want to seperate it into various pieces. I know how to use the "cut face" tool but I want to be able to select a group of faces then turn them into a seperate model. Example: I want to select the faces around his eye then extract that as a seperate model. I tried using Extract (with the "seperate extracted faces" off) then "Seperate" but the best I got was a bunch of faces that looked very faceted plus, They were disconnected from each other!! I tried selecting a bunch of edges to form a border around the area using extract and/or seperate (I tried so many things, I can't remember all of them) anyway, the bottom like is that I can't figure out how to take a single piece model and cut the mesh into seperate model pieces.

You can see the dinosaur I'm talking about on the cover page of my site: www.morphicmotion.com

Thanks for any help you can give. By the way, it's a polygon model and I'm using Maya 6. Thank for any help you can give me.