Based on the illumination model which is widely used in computer graphics and the radiance transfer law, a simplified thermal infrared imaging model is derived by: 1) adding the surface temperature distribution and the material parameters to the geometric model, 2) introducing the self emission and the detector property into the Illumination model. Using this model, the ray tracing method is applied to construct an infrared imaging system which can get the synthetic infrared images from any angle of view of the 3D scenes. Three typical 3D scenes are made to validate the infrared imaging model, and the infrared images are calculated to compare and contrast with the real infrared images obtained by a middle infrared band imaging camera. It shows that the thermal infrared imaging model is capable of producing infrared images which are very similar to those received by thermal infrared camera. Quantitative analysis shows that the absolute brightness does not match well, and the reasons are analyzed.