imagine you have a pedestal, and you want a light to circle around in a nice circular path (i’m using a sun).
any idea how to animate this? the light itself needs to revolve around the
pedestal, and the direction of the sun needs to point at the pedestal the whole time.
i tried selecting the light along with a circle i made and rotating it around the circles origin (which is at the pedestal) but that doesn’t work.
Make a bezier circle, then give the lamp a ‘track to’ constraint. The lamp will make a circuit of the circle in 100 frames, but you can change this in the properties in the dupliframes section, I believe.
To make sure the lamp follows the circle exactly and is not offset from it, remove all location data for the lamp by pressing Alt-G (I think that’s right!).
Hope that helps.
Select your sun lamp and an object you always want the sun to point at and do ctrl-t and select track to constraint. Then when you move your lamp it should always point at the object. Add a curve bezier circle for your path and postion/scale it as requird. Parent (ctrl-p) the lamp to the cirlce with follow path. Press alt-o with the lamp selected to snap the lanp to the path. Alt-a to animate in 3d window.
example blend:
http://members.shaw.ca/rjplus/ex100.blend
GreyBeard
edit: beaten to the reply again 
BRILLIANT!
thank you so much. this worked perfectly!
nother problem.
i’m trying to get it to do a complete circle in 60 frames.
i see there is ‘dupend’ set to 100, and it takes me 100 frames to complete the circle, but changing this number to 60 seems to have no effect.
You need to go to your curve settings. Change the PathLen number . . . (stands for Path Length) Or you could use a speed ipo(though not sure how)
found the pathlen,
it worked.
thanks.
you’re welcome 