"fluttering"/"flexible" objects?

Has anyone come up with a way to make something flex and bend in a naturual seeming way, wihtout resorting to a huge amount of scripting? Something like a flag blowing in the wind for instance, or a tarp draping between two poles...

ive seen flags done in photoshop and in jasc animation shop.

With my version of Ashop its just a simple filter, provide picture, type in frame count, mess with some sliders and you have a flag effect. looks decent animates ok

another way...

ive found some video fx/editing software on sourceforge.net
the best ones are Reserved for OsX, since my mac is old and doesnt have the video requirements i dont have any names off hand ... the one i use is the only windows/linux option.It crashes it freaks out if forgets things its a serious pain in the but to use and alot of buttons dont work. anyway

How these things work is you provide 2d media, rather still pictures or video, they run using OpenGL on your video card, and provide a full arsnel of ohh ahh special effects, you set up your scene (lets say 16 frames) choose efx and layer/edit everything till you like it, and export for your image editor to make it sl happy.
Since the animating is done with open Gl it looks excelent and animates smoothly.

yet another way ... 3d modeling/animation software, does the same thing as above + lighting and shadows (the mac versions of the video software might too)

There was a project I was proud to participate in... called THE GATES OF SECOND LIFE by Lex Neva and Aestival Cohen... it featured some splendid use of the underrated, and overbroken joints. You can find out more about it in this NWN article:

http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/2005/02/the_gates_come_.html

SL Forum thread:

/120/78/36753/1.html

As Osgeld alluded to, I've seen "flapping" flags that are actually animated textures cycling through multiple frames. They look okeydoke straighton, but if you tilt to an angle, you of course notice a lack of depth. FlipperPA put together an excellent tutorial for animating textures:

http://www.slboutique.com/index.php?p=content&contentid=3

I'd like to see more flexibility myself!

Well, animations are great and all, but they do not hold a candle to what I want - a cape that "swooshes", etc... the only way to have an effect like this that I can see is have some sort of physics acting on materials, based on the materials flexibility/rigidness - is this something that could only come about in the next version of the 3D engine? Any ideas on scripting something like this would be welcome too, but it needs to be random, not just some loop.

Oz Spade has been having some fascinating insights, I wouldn't hesitate to ask him.