ESO: Flag Simulation

When I was working on creating the architecture for the Systres expansion of ESO, I latched on to the idea of creating nice looking flag animation. I experimented with a lot of possibilities, but landed on this method. I wanted to share this to maybe inspire others to give it a shot. Essentially the idea is to use a simulated flag to drive the animation of bones which are skinned to a duplicate flag. The duplicate flag and bones are exported to the game as an animated asset. This allows you to create realistic flowing cloth without actually having simulation in the game. You can find tutorials on creating looping ncloth flags in Maya on Youtube, then you just need to attach bones to the surface and skin a duplicate to those bones. Pretty simple process except that manually creating and attaching all the bones is extremely time consuming and tedious. Thankfully a tech artist helped me by creating a plugin for Maya which automatically creates bones and attaches them to the flag on any points I have selected. If you want to try this method, you might need to know some programming or get some help like I did.
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