I was wondering what the best method for creating a waving flag in blender is. I have tried using an armature but that seems like an awful lot of manual work. Are there any other methods or am I stuck using the armature system?
You could use the wave effect; it should suffice if the flag is going to be distant and only in frame for a short time. It would also need to be a pretty windy day 
I think the only other option is to use amatures, which would be a lot of work to get really good results.
I was going to tell you to use a combination of armatures and the wave effect, but I just did a test and apparently thats not possible 
This is the kind of thing you would need a cloth simulator for.
EDIT: You can use RVKs and armatures.
Try Topix Cloth2 (http://www.ne.jp/asahi/viz/max/topix/Topix.html) I used it for a waving flag animation. A simple plane with an image texture did the trick. I did this in ver. 2.33 so I don’t know if something is different in 2.34
Hope this helps.
Yeah, the wave effect works best. I got a realistic looking wave for a background once just by tweaking the X and Y settings until I got it right. Also, I think you can apply more than one wave to a plane… I’ll try this tonight and get back to you…
You might also try a latice, or the new curve animation tool…
The Wave effect unfortunately will not work. The flag is going to be up close and very large, actually a split screen between two flags is what I have in mind. With this in mind any suggestions besides Topix?
I would rather use internal blender stuff, but would use topix before armatures.
Tuhouu2 has soft bodies ported from instinctive Blender. I haven’t figured out how to work them at all, but you might want to give it a try. Go over to the testing builds secton of blender.org’s forum : http://blender.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=4608
If you need the Mac version I can email you mine.