This is great stuff.
Can you put it on Zenodo to create a DOI so that I can cite you, in case I use it for my work in the future?

This is awesome. Would you be open to putting a License on the work?

Why is rt3.py so much faster than the other two?

Just came across this article and started to wonder if it is also another option to speed up the raytracing in Python.

https://medium.com/@urban_institute/using-multiprocessing-to-make-python-code-faster-23ea5ef996ba

There is a cost so without experimenting I'm not sure if it will be more efficient yet but I believe that by default Python is single core (I could be wrong).

However it could find out how many cores you have and send out chunks of pixels to be calculated on different cores and return them. You can find out how many cores with:

import multiprocessing
print( multiprocessing.cpu_count() )

Could be interesting to play with to see if it can get even faster. :)

I ran into some issues running this but then I realized it's because I was running Python 3.8. As 2.x becomes more and more deprecated and less supported may I suggest we upgrade it to Python 3.x?

I have made the changes that got it working under Python 3.x and wonder if you want me to put in a pull request for you?

My version also has an updated ReadMe.md file with instructions for the packages needed.

https://replit.com/@FrederickZiola/PyRT-1#main.py
yes, my version is pretty badly written
i'm 13 so shut
@jamesbowman i'm very impressed by your raytracer, so i spend 6-ish months improving it. It would mean a lot to me if you checked it out.

Hi I used kivy to animate the scene! I changed bit your code. feel free to test
https://github.com/DanShai/kivy_ray_tracing.git

Using as a base your raytracer and your main idea of exploiting numpy arrays, I created the following one:

https://github.com/rafael-fuente/Python-Fast-Raytracer

It cannot presume to run as fast, but it still pretty fast, and it can render impressive images.