bone animations only?

So I read that unity only imports bone animations from maya. I've never worked with bone animations before but I've read a lot on it.. my question is how do I animate things that don't have bone rigging? Like, if my character is wearing clothing that needs cloth animations (blowing in wind, etc.)? I'm just trying to make sure I can do what I want before I get into this program too much more. Can I rig the cloth?

Rigging the cloth with bones is probably your best option. Then you can add joints to the clothes and have it blow around. The steps:

  1. Add bones to parts of the cloth. The trick is to keep it low so that it isn't overly performance heavy, but still looks good. You might even have to sacrifice on the character's bones some by taking out unneeded bones ie. some facial details and maybe toes or fingers.

  2. Add joints to each bone and a rigidbody. Then select each bones parent as the anchor and tweak the settings to get a realistic feeling.

  3. Add a collider to the character to create the base.

If you are good at scripting (very good) then your could do a realtime cloth sim.