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I am just starting out with Blender and am trying to create a simulation of a tethered kite that has a fixed GoPro camera mounted to its rope looking down towards the ground along the rope.

So far I have created a 2D 8-shape path in the xy plane "up in the air" and used constraints on the camera to create the movement. Using the Follow Path constraint I was able to get the camera to follow the path along with its orientation (rotation around the z axis). Using the Limit Distance constraint I set the rope length to a fixed value.

The only thing missing now is the camera orientation towards the origin of the rope. I tried this using the Track to constraint and tracking the camera to an object on the ground at the origin of the rope. When I track it to the z-axis I get a view along the rope as desired. However, I don't want a fixed "Up" axis as used by the constraint (see animation below, the camera keeps rotation left and right as opposed to a fixed camera).

example animation path

I rather want to use the direction of the path to create the realistic rotation while still tracking the origin of the rope.

Is there an easy way to achieve this or are there other better/easier approaches to get the results that I'm trying to get?

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1 Answer 1

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Instead of Track To use the Damped Track constraint:

enter image description here

That results in this motion:

enter image description here

Orbiting a cube from above:

enter image description here

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