Hello everyone, 

I've been overthinking about it for a week now. Is it possible with iclone to perform a realistic cape animation with the wind ? Like the one on the gif... Maybe some of you have some hints or tips ? I've tried to play around with the wind, force effects, none of them seem really convincing... 
Thanks in advance for your time and advices ! 

Kal

Just offhand I'd say this will depend greatly on the actual cape mesh.  If properly designed, with the proper physics weight maps, it should be doable.  But a bad mesh or bad maps will sink this quickly.

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Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

one trick you may want to try,  in an effort to control the cape movement is to use objects on the floor,  ie - balls -  make the cape interact with other physics objects,  then make the objects into dummy objects when you are ready to render so you don't see them.

I did this once for an ocean simulation,   I gave the ocean cloth physics,  but the wind wasn't strong enough to make waves, so I used balls to interact with the mesh to create the waves. 

Those movements that look like gusts of winds could be re-created with having the cape interact with invisible objects.   Imagine that scene with invisible objects the cape is hitting.

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Thanks for the reply !
Avout the cape mesh, it is a model directly imported from Daz so it is quite good.. unfortunately, when the wind and force effects are on, the cape is too straight, however I play with the turbulence effect, I cant obtain such as realistic tissue movement floating in the wind...

Actually, if the mesh is from Daz it probably is NO good -- Daz stuff is usually great for stills, not so good for animation.

Let me know the exact item and I'll check it out.

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Alienware Aurora R16, Win 11, i9-149000KF, 3.20GHz CPU, 64GB RAM, RTX 4090 (24GB), Samsung 870 Pro 8TB, Gen3 MVNe M-2 SSD, 4TBx2, 39" Alienware Widescreen Monitor
Mike "ex-genius" Kelley

Mike is correct about the mesh and physics for capes. In general it is hard to achieve convincing results with any cape.
But if mesh is *bad* a lot of extra work requires to make it compatible with iClone physics.
And planetstardragon is correct about an external influence. Soft cloth wind cannot be animated on the timeline (changing direction or creating a turbulence). An external physics object is a must.
A while ago I came out with slightly different idea. That is a driven soft cloth. First example is here: https://forum.reallusion.com/448055/Dynamic-Blanket

Here is a fairly quick example of driven cape. Note: I have a zero wind there.
I did not spent much time to drive cape accurately. There are some abrupt movements.
But with effort some nice results can be achieved. Specially by adding a Z wind and animating a cape properly.

Girl on the right wears a regular cape. Left girl wears a cape with a special pocket I have attached to the back of the cape, which in turn has a rigid sphere inside.
Sphere is animated on the timeline. As I said not much time was spent with sphere animation. I was just fooling around



Now the pocket has to be created and attached in some external app (I use Blender).
This particular one looks like this:


Tutorial which gives an idea how to make a pocket for cloth driver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hORqqTb99ck

the more i watch that cape in that clip the more I realize how much it defies physics! -  it's anything but natural. 

batmans cape is huuge!  to block knives and not get ripped on any fence he jumps over,  I'm guessing it would have to be made of something like Kevlar ,  each kevlar vest weighs about 5-6 pounds -  batmans cape would need at least 6 vests worth of kevlar to make that cape, and would have to weigh at the very least 30 pounds -  yet the wind is blowing it around as if it was made of light cotton.

Plus it's hollywood ..so you know they faked it to look "natural"   someone got paid well to make the wind just right, without having anything else in that clip being blown around like in a tornado!!   Don't believe the hype!

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Are you serious? It is a fantasy movie. Nothing about *real* is there and there should not be. Of course it would be thin and light as nylon, yet it would deflect bullets

Thanks for the replies everyone. I will try to make it interact with some dummy objects today, see the results and post it here. I just want the tissue to look good and impressive lol

Kelley: This is the mesh I use from Daz, if you want to check it out: 

https://www.daz3d.com/dforce-sy-capes-ii-for-genesis-8

4u2ges, your idea for animating a cloth looks brilliant. I will try to give it a go when I find the right mesh... 

Thanks for the help !