Problem rigging a camera...

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen,

I keep struggling with a rigging problem that apparently sounds quite simple but for which I haven’t found a valid solution yet.
That’s the reason why I’m now turning myself to the more experienced guys out there, in hope that they could hopefully shed some light on this (I’m using Blender for many years now, but never digged into the details of rigging, so I’m certainly not a specialist in there, - otherwise might not have been asking you this :slight_smile: ).

So here it is:
I have to materialize a camera and its field of view. In order to do so, I have created a quite simple armature that allows my camera to move around two axes (rotation axes of the real device).



I would like that the optical axis of my camera sensor exactly follows an empty located somewhere on the ground (in the world environment) like illustrated here:


In order to do that, I have added a bone constraint type “track to” to my bone.003 (tracking my Camera_Target.005 empty) and a constraint type “copy rotation” to bone.002.

Unfortunately and as anticipated, this method doesn’t offer the required accuracy as my bone.003 is not located at the focal point of my sensor and therefore the optical axis comes a bit off when staring using the empty.



Is there a way to fix that ?

Many thanks in advance for your support and time looking into this.

B.

Use a damped track on the one that copies the empty. Align the bones so they both point horizontal and copy rotation on only one axis - like Z with the same bone roll. Hard to tell without a blend but I think that is what you need.