I little cloth physics experiment that kinda evolved into a waving flag with shading and all

Requires Overlay Object. (available here)

It works like this:
I always add some value to each point's velocity vectors which controls their speed and direction. I always add a gravity factor, but also a semi-random wind factor (based on a lot of sine-waves) which prevents it from falling all the way down.

I then loop over all points and draw a polygon over 4 points to get a vertical 'slab'. Most of the time I draw a red polygon but also a white polygon at the center (this makes the white horizontal stripe through the flag)
At the vertical lines 6 and 7 I only draw a completely white polygon to get the vertical white stripe.

Shading is calculated by doing a dot-product on the flags surface normal vector and with the direction of the light. This gives me the amount of light each polygon has which I use to correct the color.

The result is this waving flag

You can control the points where the flag is anchored by checking the check button to make them visible. You drag them around inside the boundaries of the overlay object.

Would be fun to see the different kinds of flags you can make with this

This is one of the most impressive effects Ive seen done in MMF2 Playing with the anchor points alone is a somewhat satisfying activity.

OMG, This is awesome!

Cool thing Andos!

This is amazing! Nice example!

Very cool!

Stephen1980

Really Cool! How do I change the flag texture to say something like the Union Flag?

This looks 3D, it's hard to believe it's just 2D with shading. That is, until you get it to draw the parts that are behind it infront of it's self...

Just a really cool and great example! I got a steady 27 FPS here. XD

Thanks for the comments

To make something like the union flag you would have to figure out a way to draw the diagonal stripes "slab" by "slab". I just drew the white stripes over the red polygon, but I had to make it slightly larger than the slab because of some red showing through. I might change this example so it instead draws one part of the flag at a time. This would not only fix the problem but probably also make it easier to draw any shape in the flag.

I suspect one of the reasons this example is so slow is also because of it being drawn in Overlay Object. It will redraw the entire background every frame which is very slow. Not sure if removing the gradient backgrounds will speed it up for you.
A way around that would be to use Active Overlay while the actual overlay is invisible.

Wow this is cool!