Waving Flags

To add more detail, colour and additional animation to my castle, I decided to put in some banners and flags. To make a flag I first of all used the line tool to draw out a box. Once I had the box in place and at the right shape, the next step was to add a garment maker modifier, which basically adds a mesh to your shape, and you can increase the number of polygons on the material by increasing the number of iterations - a higher number of iterations means a higher quality end product.

After setting the garment maker, I added my texture which was the Italian flag and put on a UVW Map to fit it to the shape. Once I had this, I was ready to add the cloth modifier. This modifier takes a while to get used to, but once I figured out how to appropriately make use of it, it was easy and very fun to use. At this point I created a flag pole so that I had something to attach my flag to. The next step was to set the object properties for my flag. The material I used was cotton, and then I added my flag pole as to the table and enabled it as a collision object.

After doing this, I was able to attach my flag to the flag pole by dropping down on the cloth modifier and going to the group sub-menu. Once I highlighted the vertasis I wanted to connect to the pole, I grouped them up and used the sim node tool to attach this group to the pole. At this the flag is fully functional and after simulating it, it shows the flag taking shape and dropping down the pole. To make the flag much more realistic within my scene, I needed to add a way of making it move freely. To do this, I added a wind force, which is found under the 'create -> space warps -> forces' menu. A force is something that has an outward effect on other objects on your scene, such as in this case, wind blowing our flag so that it doesn't fall down lifelessly.

Now that the wind is in the viewport, I pointed it in the direction that I wanted my flag to blow, that is away from the flag pole, and enabled the force on the cloth modifier on the flag. After doing this, it was a matter of adjusting the strength of the wind to get the wind looking as realistic as possible. I used the same process to create the banners on the castle - except I attached the banners to the castle wall so they didn't fall into the floor due to gravity and used a spherical wind force instead of a directional one so that the banners blow around a bit more sporadically.