way to have spot lights focus on an given object??

Support Lighting and Rendering
1

in my modeling i would love to know how to have spot lights (and the other directional type lights) point at an obect and then if i move the lights they rotate to keep pointing at the object.

im trying to get https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5398233/skinshade4.blend lit with decent shade range with the minimum number of lights.

btw anything that uses Cycles is useless to me.

2

Select the light, shift select the object and Ctrl+T / Track to constraint or just manually add a ‘track to’ constraint in the constraints panel. The light will always point towards the objects origin

3

so if i need the lights to track something further up i need to use a dummy object?? Im thinking i need the lights to track the neck area to get the shading right.

4

Add an empty and track to that instead of the object and position it wherever you want. You can then parent the empty to the object.

5

i think i have it set but the lights are not tracking correctly (should the lights be rotating during track??)

on a related subject do you know of a skin material that can be edited to do different “races” or somebody that knows Blender and Skin Materials on an expert level??

I have googled but the materials all will not work (Cycles, to complex for my needs, to simple, and just flat out WRONG)

6

“Tracking” can be a bit tricky … :ba: … :ba: … :ba: … particularly when you work on setting the X, Y, and Z axis of the Track constraint.

Yes, it can be very handy to use an Empty as a go-between… parenting (or otherwise associating) the Empty with the “real” object that is to be tracked, and then tracking that Empty. Because this gives you something that you can “grab ahold of and push just a leee-tle bit” to get that light to point exactly where you want it.

Y’know the expression, "watch the little birdie!!"​ :yes: Well, an Empty is sometimes a great “little birdie.” It is literally “just a point in 3D space,” yet it is an object. It has a position and it has an orientation, it can parent and be parented and can participate in constraints … it can even be animated … yet it is non-visual.