The switch was modeled using a shareware 3D modeling program called Moray for Windows and contains about 150 primitives. The two views were separately rendered using the free (and extraordinarily powerful) ray-tracer "POV-Ray for Windows." The two views were joined and converted to a JPG using Paint Shop Pro, a shareware graphics program. Paint Shop Pro was also used to create the various transparent GIFs for the overlays.

I just recently began using Moray (I have been manually writing scripts until now). It is the first shareware modeler I have tried that actually worked well -- and it works extremely well. Note that Moray requires either POV-Ray or PolyRay (the former highly recommended and I believe support for the latter is about to be dropped by the Moray developers). If you're interested in 3D graphics you can get and POV-Ray but don't forget to come back here to finish the switch lesson!