From what I can see in that video it looks to me like the shingles themselves have a very simple action (they are blown up by wind and fall back down with gravity), and really all the interesting part of the effect comes from the variations in airflow across the surface.

Maybe you could look at getting a vector field for the wind in from some CFD program, then you could have each flap be affected by the closest vector. Of course you really need a time varying vector field, which is trickier. You could perhaps import a static solution and add random time variation (though this should probably be somehow weighted more heavily in more turbulent regions).

I have been thinking to add a very simple wind force (similar to how pressure works now, but just projecting a wind vector onto the normal of the triangle and multiplying by the area). This wouldn't take care of what the wind vector should be, but it should allow things like flapping flags.

If I had a few months(maybe years) to dedicate purely to it I'd love to have a go at implementing actual real-time 3d fluids in Kangaroo, but I doubt that's ever going to happen!

Perlin noise is often used to give the effect of smooth but random variations in wind.
Maybe you could try using a Perlin-noise-based vector field?

- Giulio
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giulio@mcneel.com
McNeel Europe, Barcelona