Ray-Tracing
Above: Ray Tracing in the Middle ages
POVRay (Persistence Of Vision) is probably the most complete and powerful raytracer available. This is a freeware program and can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/. This program will be required to complete the raytracing assignment.
A good POVRay tutorial is available at http://library.thinkquest.org/3285/
Some of the more complex POVray objects such as patches and splines are very difficult to manipulate by hand. MORAY is an interactive 3D scene editor which allows you to model POVray scenes, textures and objects interactively. This is a shareware program, a time limited evaluation version can be downloaded from http://www.stmuc.com/moray/