Spotlight on Ball

[Richard_Rayer]

I added a few textures to make the ball a little more the focus of the show. I have not finished this lecture as I stopped at the challenge to see if I could accomplish this feat. What I did was to parent an empty to the ball. Then I tracked the empty with the spotlight. That was the difficult part as what I thought was the proper constraints on the tracking didn’t work. I played with the settings on the “Track To” constraint until it worked. I came up with these settings:
Target: Empty
To: -Z
Up: Y
Space World Space to World Space
Influence = 1.000

I would have thought that “Up” should be Z and “Target To” would be X as the ball is moving on the X axis. Don’t know why it worked but it worked with the settings I chose.

Here is my attempt at spotlighting the Ball.

[Richard_Rayer]

Here is the Spotlight on Ball animation after I finished the lecture. I see now that a rig for the light is better than tracking an empty on the ball. I did not have to deal with problems for the axes as the light parented to the bone did not have problems tracking the ball’s axes.

Well, at least now, I know that a problem can have multiple solutions.