I'm an artist, your an artist, Lickerish is an artist too!

[heterotic]

If you decide to do ray tracing, you're even more awesome than you are already! The hard parts are learning to use a 3-d modeller and waiting for the computer to render a scene, it's very cpu-intensive. The good part is Pov-ray (one of the best rendering engines) and Midnight Modeller (a pretty good modeller) are free. If you've already got CAD, though, you can export them to pov-ray format.

 

[lickerish]

heterotic.. the website you linked, as far as I can tell, was about some sort of contest? Where can I learn more about actually doing this ray tracing?