While trying to develop a quick flag for my feature I stumbled on a neat way to generate a kind of soft-body flag entirely with procedural textures.

A flag has to be constrained at the pole end and have plenty of random flutter to appear real. Whilst some spectacular work is going on to create soft-body dynamics in the test builds of Blender, I needed something a bit sooner. A little careful thinking later gave a simple and quick renderable solution to the problem.

• Create a plane and size to the dimensions of the required flag.
• Sub-divide the plane several times (4) and ensure that each vertex is set to smooth.
• Create a material for the flag to the colour and specularity of the type of fabric.
• In texture slot 0 add a blend texture. Tighten the blend a little with the contrast & brightness settings in the Colors tab.
• In the materials mapto don’t map it to anything but ensure that stencil is selected. (This will mean that all other textures in higher slots will only appear or work on the lighter areas of the blend stencil.)
• In texture slot 1 put a wood texture with bandnoise and Soft Noise. Adjust the Turbulence just a little to give variation.
• Map this to Displacement and adjust the amount to a small size. Render a few times as you adjust the amount to obtain a reasonable flag wind look.
• Create a material IPO for texture slot 1 (the wood texture) and create a curve for OfsX and OfsY 3.00 to 0 over 100 frames gives a reasonable flutter.
• Render an animation and watch your flag flutter in the wind.