I’m trying to make an animation of a cloth banner falling and moving as if blown by the wind but I need it to end up in a specific shape and location. This is what the banner will look like as it comes to rest. Any and all tips would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-ShaggyG
You could generate the animation backwards. Use the target shape as the starting point for a cloth simulation with negative gravity and wind, then reverse the direction of play afterwards.
Best wishes,
Matthew
Hmm thanks for the idea, I tried that and I like the way it looks, unfortunately this is only a portion of a larger animation so I can’t just reverse part of it while there is more going on in the background 
Sure you can! Render the flag (with alpha) and the background separately, as an image sequence, then composite them together using the Video Sequence Editor.
If the flag casts a shadow on the ground, you may need to do an additional pass for just the ground shadow. To do that I make a “shadeless” white shader for all of the shadow casting objects, and a white shader for the ground with 0.5 emit (this softens the shadow a bit). You can also use “Only Shadow” but it gives really crude results, and I haven’t found a way to fix that. Then multiply that layer into the final comp. 
Here is a video I made which uses compositing fairly heavily. There were about 13 layers of compositing in all. It’s not uncommon for big budget productions to have more than that. Here are some breakdown shots from X-Men for example.