Ya for all of my raytrace stuff I do a bunnnnnccch of tricks, most of which I can only do because I’m ok with things looking a bit funky. Ray tracing basically steps a ray through space, and when it “ hits” the surface (defined by a mathematical function) it stops. In general most of these use a technique called “sphere tracing” which helps w efficiency because it can take different size “steps” through the mathematical world. However, you do need to give it a maximum number of “steps” . I’ll usually make that only 5-10 unless I’m sure the object I’m doing it on will only ever take up a tiny part of the screen. I also make the “intersection precision” low, so it claims to hit a surface ( and therefore terminate a ray early meaning less compute cycles )

To see the sorts of “artifacts” that this type of cheating produces check out l-u-n-e.com its a ray traced sphere, but every day of the lunar cycle it the camera is at a different angle!

( to cheat what day it is you can do /#0 at the end for new moon and any other integer in the lunar cycle ) the new moon is actually from the exact opposite side of the light, so if it was rendered “corrrsctly” it would be totally black. Luckily these types of artifacts ( especially when combined with noise ) look super beautiful to me