I went deep into the world of cloth simulation for this promo for The Americans Season 6. I used both Marvelous Designer and Houdini to achieve the cloth simulation and model, then I rendered using Vray in 3DS Max.
Each cloth star was individually stitched to the base of the flag so they could carry different physical properties. The stars on the real flag were more rigid than the base fabric, so I used similar physical constraints for the simulation in Marvelous Designer, which worked well and caused very natural creasing and pinching. The stripes were separated by fabric seams to create visible creases and I modeled piping and stitch lines along the edges. Lastly, I created fine displacement maps from photos of the actual flag to extract additional crease details to match the reference.
We had more fun on the project with a unique chemical process that you can read about here: bgstr.com/newsletter/the-americans
