Comment by otaviogood

This article talks about a pretty full-featured ray tracer. If you just want to play around with some ideas and have fun, you can make different tradeoffs and still get very nice and fast renderings. Here's a ray tracer that I made that's GPU-accelerated and can make some nice looking images quickly in 1000 lines of code. https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4ddcRn The tradeoff is that it's all procedural graphics. So there are no triangle meshes and it would also be a bit tricky to implement a bidirectional ray tracer like this.