What you are describing sounds more like ray casting than ray tracing. Ray casting is the old Wolfenstein 3D look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting ht

What you are describing sounds more like ray casting than ray tracing. Ray casting is the old Wolfenstein 3D look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting Ray tracing is what Pixar uses for Toy Story, Monsters Inc, etc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics) And then the new hotness for offline rendering is Path Tracing, which is a form really good but really hard to accelerate form of ray tracing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing And yes fundamentally all of these are "shoot rays out from the camera", hence the very specific terminology used for each to disambiguate which approach to shooting out rays from the camera is being used and what happens when rays hit a thing.