Early on, I learned a lot about computer graphics by writing ray tracers.
I wrote my first one in 1987 during my senior year of high school. I had to figure out a lot of the math by myself although I did have some help from my math teacher.
The first objects I rendered were based on polygons, because while visiting RPI's graphics lab as a prospective college student, I distinctly remember the tour guide saying that ray tracing curved surfaces was "really hard." Years later I realized that she was probably talking about superquadrics, which are a special kind of curved surface that nobody has ever really used in practice.
I remember that my slow PC would take all night to render the simple images below. I would wake up extremely excited at 6:00 AM as if it was Christmas morning and stumble over to the computer in a foggy haze to see the results.
The images are in 24 bit color but I was never able to see them that way at the time. The graphics card I had could only handle a palette of 256 colors and I didn't know how to deal with that restriction effectively. I think I displayed them using a simple color cube with a lot of ugly quantization artifacts.
It wasn't until the next year in college at CMU that I found out that ray tracing spheres and cylinders was significantly easier. I wrote another ray tracer as a quick hack during the few days I had free during final exam week.
The following summer, in 1989, I wrote a more sophisticated ray tracer that handled arbitrary transformations and had a complex scene definition file format.
I read a paper about color quantization techniques to compress everything down to 256 colors that I could display on a VGA card. It would have been nice if I had known about error diffusion dithering.
The next summer, in 1990, I wrote a ray tracer that supported polygons, quadrics, CSG, and texture maps. In the computer graphics class I took that fall, I added Kay-Kajia bounding slab code to optimize intersection tests. I remember being inspired by a book describing Pixar's RenderMan, and created a very similar C API for scene definitions.
The following semester I got access to the graphics lab at CMU, and they had copy of RenderMan, so there was no reason to write renderers any more.
I haven't written any renderers since that time. Sometimes it's more fun when you can't go buy something and you have to write it yourself. You learn more that way.
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