I invented a cool insignia to use in the book I’m writing.

But just drawing it out wasn’t enough. I wanted to see it in action.

Solution: Blender, of course! After I got it working, I had to come here and write up a tutorial so you can make a battle banner too.

It’s been a long time since I’ve send one of these, so if you’re still reading, thanks for being here.

Read on to see how to hang any design up on a realistic, simulated battle banner.

*If you’re interested, follow me on Instagram where I post updates!

Today’s Technique

First, create the basic flag-shaped mesh. I started with a subdivided plane, then used the Proportional Editing and Extrude tools to shape it. The little bits hanging off add a lot of character to the flag.

Next, select a few pairs of vertices at the top of the mesh. Add them all to a single vertex group in the Mesh Properties panel. This defines where the cloth will hang from.

Now, in the Physics panel, add Cloth physics. Set your Pin Group to hang the banner from the vertices you chose.

In the Modifiers panel, add a Subdivide Simple before the Cloth, and a Solidify with a very low Thickness after the cloth to make it realistically thick. Add a Subdivision Surface after that to smooth everything out again.

Add one or more Wind force fields, and point them at the cloth. I had to turn mine up very high before I noticed any change in the simulation. You can also add a Turbulence field to make the wind force messier.

Now materials and texturing! Paint, draw, or otherwise create your insignia. In the UV Editor, unwrap the flag using Unwrap → Project From View, and position your texture. If you like, you can go to UV → Export Layout to export a template image to guide your texture creation.

Then, for more realism, you can download a free cloth texture (I used one from AmbientCG), and use a Color Multiply node to combine your insignia with the cloth. Also, mix a Translucent shader in for a semi-transparent cloth.

Now build the frame for the banner to hang from. You’ll need a tall cylinder for the pole, one for the crossbeam, some small supports, and a few cylinders or flattened cubes to make the “clips” that hold the banner on.

Then add basic materials to those parts, and you’re done.

If you want to get more advanced, you can use shape keys to animate the pin vertices moving closer together over the first few frames of the simulation, creating that nice rumpled effect at the top. But it’s not mandatory.

Then, get ready to render. Set up an HDRI and a Sun light. If you want to add more atmosphere, you can add a cube over the scene with a light volumetric shader for fog, and add in some sound on the final render (like I did here.)

Don’t forget to enable Motion Blur in the Render settings!

Featured Render

Today’s featured render is just my final result! Click to watch it on instagram. I even added a bit of sound which makes it cooler.

samuel.sullins

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Thanks for reading to the end!

— Samuel