After a bit of cleaning up my Windows partition, I had enough space to actually use it for things other than coding, so I tweaked a few settings for performance's sake and installed blender. After jumping through a few hoops to get LEGO models imported correctly, I was then faced with the arduous task of fixing the problems with the model.

Apparently, the people who put many hours of work into designing hundreds of thousands of LEGO pieces got tired of doing all the same parts over and over again, and started copy-pasting normals and such from one part to the next, but unfortunately forgot to keep an eye on which side the faces were pointing. As a result, many of the parts in my models have odd holes in them, or with a setting changed to fix the holes, the lighting and shading effects become buggy.

As a result, I've been spending lots of time just zooming in on each piece and selecting faces that are backwards and inverting them. Tedious manual work, and while there is an automatic tool to do it for me, it doesn't really work because there are so many polygons that need fixing....

As of now it's almost done. Next steps will be to correctly align the gearing system, parent the necessary groups of parts, and then rig them together.