Thank you so much for all of your help thus far! I've been very busy this past weekend so I haven't had a chance to try out the advice yet, but hopefully I'll have a shot at it during the week.
Drongle, that was a very detailed walkthrough you gave me, although I must admit that being the newbie I am, some of it went over my head a bit! When you were putting that internal architecture together, did you model it all from scratch in Blender itself? I think I'd be able to do that as well, but right now I've been exporting prims in Collada form into Blender so that I have (supposedly) the right