[tintin]

Well why is this terrible advice? Maybe you could explain this instead of calling me terrible.

I was serious. When you want to start programming in 3D you should first start with the basics: rendering. Raytracing is a very good place to start. There are tons of tutorials online and maybe the most important: it gives a nice visual result.

The visual results are very important. It will encourage to keep on programing and working on getting better results.

So I was serious. Building a raytracer gives you a lot of knowledge about 3D, programming and optimizations.

[palish]

I apologize for calling you terrible, but pagekalisedown called him clueless and you chimed in with agreement. The guy's completely new to gamedev and eager... it seems pretty terrible to go out of our way to specifically try to destroy his enthusiasm by calling him clueless.

That said, you're spot-on about how a raytracer is an excellent (and fun!) project that every graphics programmer should do at least once.

But... if you're saying "in order to get started doing any kind of 3D programming, such as moving a cube around, then you should first write your own raytracer"... then we'll have to agree to disagree. =)