Maya Cloth problem
 

I need some help for a project I am working on. I need to put a tie on a flamingo, and have the tie move in the air as the flamingo flies. I am using Maya Cloth for the tie, but when I start the local simulation, the tie either ends up flying away from the flamingo, or wrinkles itself into a ball. How should I constrain the tie to the flamingo so that it acts like a tie should?

to constrain a cloth object to a character you will want to use a mesh constraint....that will keep any cloth object constrained to the character. There are other settings you will need to set up to make the tie react to fields and stuff....but start with the mesh constraint

The other big big thing you need to do also that I forgot to mention is your character needs to be a collision object