The math is the main hurdle for this kind of thing for most people, but luckily it's not that hard. You don't need to be a mathematician, and can survive with a

The math is the main hurdle for this kind of thing for most people, but luckily it's not that hard. You don't need to be a mathematician, and can survive with a working knowledge of it. Also, the math you use in graphics programming is what you need to know anyways for most other game programming. Ray tracing is a good way to start IMO, because it's easier to understand than rasterization, it's easy to write your own simple ray tracer, and it relies almost entirely on the math. So I definitely recommend finding some tutorials for that. Peter Shirley's "ray tracing in one weekend" book is a popular one. You could also look into doing ray marching instead of ray tracing, which is slightly more complicated, but fundamentally the same, you can actually see them in realtime on most hardware, even on mobile (examples: https://www.shadertoy.com/ https://www.shadertoy.com/)