Hoist the colours
I wanted to create an interesting intro for my showreel and I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with Vellum Cloth, so a nice flag sim seemed like the way to go! I wanted to concentrate on giving it a realistic movement, as well as generating a rough material for the flag itself and creating a convincing emboss effect on the text that fades in.
It’s quite a simple setup which had me hopping between Houdini and After Effects. I've laid out some of the techniques that I used to create the shot below.
Vellum Cloth
This is the node tree for the Vellum cloth, with a flipbook to show the final effect. The technique is a piece of cloth suspended on either end with a gentle rotation on the constraints to make it “ripple”. By disabling gravity I was able to get it to behave how I wanted it to, I didn’t want it to sag but rather appear more “floaty”. I used quite a high resolution piece of geometry to get very fine ripples, but as it is just a grid it really didn’t have a noticeable effect on performance.
Shading
In After Effects I experimented with animated masks that I would use for the material colour information on the letters. I used a similar technique for the main displacement texture on the flag. By combining the two, this enabled me to achieve the rough denim effect I was after whilst simultaneously making the letters stand out as if they were printed on top.
The main Object level network below, nice and tidy!