Doesn't really come out in a still of course, but I've started work on a shader for chutes. It's based on displacement functions (like the dragon wing animation) and delivers very natural and organic motions.
What you can see here at the edge is a deformation mode of the circular shape (the small see-saw pattern...) - basically this goes into some flapping motion under speed while the centroid of the chute swings in somewhat irregular sines around.
I'm going to try for a fold mode next when the chute is separated (my current idea is to pass a force parameter to the shader that indicates whether there's something heavy pulling at it - that would also give a gross deformation of the chute - and if there's nothing pulling it goes flat and eventually folds into something non-chute. Let's see how this goes...