Well, I've started modeling the robot, and things are progressing at a snail's pace. After spending over an hour trying to figure out how to put the pictures of my sketches as bitmap's on reference boxes like the tutorial for modeling a plane, and only ending up with white surfaces, I decided to just plow ahead and model without them. I've only used boxes and cylinders so far, but will start adding in hoses and other things when I get the basic shapes completed.