Animated Flag

You may need to repeat the steps from before to get your flag to hang naturally in its rest state without intersecting the pole when you rewind your animation. To do this set your uniform field to 8 and play your animation. When the flag is upright and away from the pole, select your particle object and use “Solvers > Initial State > Set for Selected” again. Then rewind your animation and turn the uniform field Mag to 0 and play again. This will cause your flag to fall with gravity but bounce and settle in a rest position around the flag pole. Once the flag has settled and stopped shifting, set your initial state again for the particles and turn your uniform field back on.

Now when you play your animation, the flag starts out in a rest position around the pole and then springs to attention based on the fields without going through the flag pole to get there.

There you have it, a realistic flag ready for Independence Day!

Here are a couple images of the final version. Still - Movie.