I put on videos for ambient sounds sometimes and I see this type of artwork a lot and it looks cool and also looks like it might be fun to try sometime. What are some modern programs that make this type of art ? And a lot of it looks like you could easily copy real pictures/etc, which I'd have to do, because I'd never draw that on my own, but I could color it and animate it.

It reminds me of old style bitmap art or whatever it called, where they create animation by changing the pixel param's, /minimum block param's

 

You can do a lot of stuff (including animation) in Blender.

Bit of a learning curve though...

 

I'm not sure what you are asking specifically, but I think the term you are looking for is "ray tracing".

Essentially you define a world that has a bunch of objects in it. Each object has a bunch of properties such as shape, color, texture, reflectivity, transparency, and so on. You also define light sources that also have properties such as color and intensity. Once you have this defined, the program then traces how much light from each object in the world will be reflected/refracted from each light source to each pixel in the image.

You can then make movies by having objects in the world move and properties change over time and generating a new image for each frame of the movie.

You can get extremely realistic rendering of scenes this way, but it can require a huge amount of computer time to do.

There are other techniques, such as ray casting, that take a much more limited approach but can generate images in real time even on limited hardware. This is how the first dungeon maze games were done.

 

no def. not ray tracing