Reflecting a golfball off a wall to a hole and compensating for the balls radius

Question

Problem: I'm struggling to compensate for the radius of a ball when reflecting it off a wall towards a target. (sorry I cannot yet post images)

What I want is to do this: golf reflections

but this does not compensate for the size of the ball. Any guidance would be helpful.

Would love to know how to compensate for this. Thanks!

Answer 1

Offset the wall by the radius of the ball. By doing this, you compensate for the radius of the ball, so thereafter, you can consider the ball to be a point, and do the computations shown in your reference.

Answer 2

The point that is reflecting off a wall according to those rules is not the center of the ball but the point on the ball where it touches the wall. Thats how you account for it. If you have a rectangle, you only need to use 4 points on the ball plus its center.

Answer 3

If you consider a golf ball to be spherical, the ball touches the wall when the center is one radius away. If you normally track the ball location with the center, you can move the walls one radius inward and have the proper moment of reflection. If you want to account for the dimples it is much harder. You need to account for the orientation of the ball, then.