After a bit of polish, I'm posting another revision of this robot. I used Blender 2.62 and cycles to render the Earth and Robot, created the backdrop in Photoshop, and composited everything together in post using Blender's compositor. While the Earth and Robot were together in the same scene, I split them into separate render layers so that I could run separate post filtering and color correction on each and then use z-combine to bring them back together. This is 3000 samples.
