Hi, thepan, thnks for responding.
Unfortunately the existing attributes won't work. Here's the scenario:
My customer makes products where you can choose the product color and the material it is made from. Some colors are the same for all materials, whereas other colors are unique to a particular material and not available in other materials. On the front office product pages, I plan to have 3 columns of color options, one for each material choice. Then the customer can come in and choose color and material by selecting the texture. If i were to split it up into two attributes, the end user could accidentally select color/material combinations that are not actually available.
I need the extra field mainly for display purposes. On the product page, the textures will be split into three columns, one for each material type.