Creating A Flag In Maya

During a creativity workshop we were tasked with designing a flag. This inspired me to model and animate the flag in Maya.

To start with, I modelled the flag and pole. The pole is a cylinder primitive scaled down and stretched in the Y-axis. The flag is a poly plane that I rotated 90 degrees to face sideways. I then translated it into position on the pole such that the edge intersected with the face of the cylinder.

Next, I increased the number of subdivisions on the poly plane. This increased the number of polygons that are able to move, thus will make the flag animation much smoother and more realistic. Using the FX toolbar, I made the pole a passive collider. This will allow me to fix the flag's edge onto the pole.

To attach the flag to the pole I constrained the vertices on the edge of the poly plane to the pole's surface. I then selected the poly plane and selected "Create nCloth" in the FX toolbar. This makes the poly plane behave like a cloth and assigns a nucleus to it. With this nucleus I can change variables such as acceleration due to gravity, air density, windspeed and wind direction.

Finally, I textured the model with the flag design from the creativity workshop. I also textured the flagpole with the default Maya wood texture. All that was left to do now was to run the animation.

I like how the flag turned out, and I learned a lot about the more technical "simulation" side of Maya whilst making it.