Quote: " Also, can I load a 3D object and apply it with a material(with multiple textures and color parameters in it) instead of just the texture?"
As far as materials go yes you can have them in dbp, every objects mesh/limbed meshes each have a material even without the texture, as standard. The limit is 1 material per mesh, look here to get a better understanding for materials;
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb147175%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Take a look at object appearance commands in help files to make the required property settings you want. Take a look at vertex data commands to operate on any individual vertex.
If your using shader effects you can choose to set some or all of the material properties(not sure about emmisive) either in the shader or by passing the settings to the shader from dbp code, but it all depends on what type of shader it is and what it does. Shaders can be either vertex shaders(.vsh files), pixel shaders(.psh files) or both(.fx files) in dbp, Ive never used asm shaders but Ive seen an example on the forums here somewhere, but you will have to choose whats best for your needs. In your case get familiar with all object commands and properties before you delve into shaders is my advice.
What you describe sounds more like a blend shader that takes several textures and uses 1 of them to "paint" the other textures to the mesh based on pixel position, pixel rgba values and uv coordinates of the "painting" texture for each polygon of the mesh, you can find examples of this in various forms using the search feature situated at the bottom of each page of this forum, some use them to paint paths and different areas of a terrain for example, the limit for textures in dx9 on a mesh is 8 afaik.
Quote: "After learning how to load a 3D object into space, I'm still trying to figure out how to add a couple of basic effects to a texture like make parts of it glow on a 3D object, even when light is not shining on it.
I'm still trying to find a way on how this could be done."
Reason I address this second and not first is because it may be possible to achieve a cheap similar result by faking it with multiple meshes and/or using in part the material properties previously detailed in the link and help commands along with the blend mapping command(not blend shading as the cheap way would not be to use shaders) and perhaps other mapping commands if using multiple meshes - this is all more of guess on my part as Ive seen normal mapping of a fashion done with this command. You will have to play around a fair bit though.
IF I get chance to I`ll see if I can find a cheap solution, right now though I don`t have the means to for various reasons.
Quote: " Is a Quake3 style texture shader possible in DBPro? "
Based on the screen shots brought up by google images I would have thought so. DBP in its official form is dx9 (and I think some of dx8) so the shader models can`t go beyond sm3. There is an in-house version of dbpx10 but tbh its difficult enough for advanced users let alone beginners but that can take you to sm4. So find out which shaders your interested in from Quake3 and determine what shader models they use. If they require a dx10 graphics card then the official version of dbp won`t cut it.