I know this is an old post, but it’s 2018 and not much is new is online for help making a realistic cape in Unity (without expensive software, difficulty or effort). I’ve read and followed all the links too, and have tried many assets too. I know you can rig a cape and make animations for it, but that requires way more work and adds to the file size of the project and build. Unity’s physic-system is actually quite impressive (compared to my old C++ days), and the cloth component already makes a realistic cloth mesh with little effort. So, using the Cloth Component, I finally got my cape working (still not perfectly), so I thought I’d help anyone still working on capes, ribbons, cloths, etc, in Unity. First of all, I read that Unity 5.6 and above have an update for the Cloth Component in Unity3D, versions below that have an un-updated cloth-component. I can’t verify that myself yet, but I personally haven’t upgraded past 5.5.4 yet, so maybe any advice I give will only apply to ones still using older versions of Unity.
Anyways, f0r54ken brings up a good point, things in Unity can get broken (sometimes easily), and that’s one of the major problems with cloth components also. There are two major issues that I noticed that cause the cloth component (cape) to get messed-up (and in some cases it can’t be undone with ‘undo’ either). One thing is the cloth constraints (the points where the cloth ‘attaches’ to an object), if Unity has trouble with the formation of your constraints (where they are and/or what their values are, or if you have a conflicting constraint somewhere) it can cause major glitches in the cloth(cape) and problems in the flow of the cloth, the cloth’s physics, etc. Also, another issue is the colliders which the cloth needs so it doesn’t just ‘fall’ through your character, but instead drapes over them, and is effected/blocked by the characters legs and arms. That seems to be the biggest problem for me, because the colliders needed by the cape interfere with Unity’s character controller systems (3rd person, etc). It causes the character controller to stay crouched when not supposed to, stay airborne when not supposed to, etc. I assume the cape’s capsule/sphere colliders are triggering ground and overhead-clearance collisions(character controller). I still haven’t found any good tutorials that show anything other than the most basic 3d-Plane-Cloth setup. I’ve been through many scripts, forums, documentation, assets, projects, etc, but I’m still hoping that when I switch to Unity 5.6 or 2017 the cloth component will work better for me. I’ve seen a few tutorials that show animating a cape first, in other 3D software like Blender or Maya, then exporting the animations of the cape flowing into Unity. Those methods require you to make cape animations for all the different states of the cape (like flying, falling, jumping, running, etc.), they also require you to rig the cape (give it bones-Avatar) which isn’t so easy to do (depending on the software you’re using) since it has to be compatible with Unity and it’s Animator. If anyone reading this has any suggestions or info it would be appreciated, keeping in mind I’m still stuck using Unity 5.5.4 on a 32-bit system (Win7) for now. If f0r54ken has had any success since 2016 I’d like to hear about it, hopefully you didn’t give up.
So, I’ll just end with saying how I got the best results so far (with Unity 5.5.4) with making a realistic cape in Unity. Let’s say I have a 3D model, in the common Wavefront OBJ format (maybe converted from XPS Lara format), and it is a superhero with a cape object. I found it common for 3D models (even FBX’s) to have the cape grouped with the character (or all one object), so that the character and cape are treated in Unity as one object. What you want is the cape to be a separate object. I use Mixamo.com for rigging the character for use in Unity. I use Blender3D (I’d like to try Maya) to save the cape and the character as separate Wavefront OBJ objects, and I use Mixamo to rig the character OBJ and convert the character (without cape because Mixamo can’t rig capes) into FBX for Unity.
After that, I import the FBX character into Unity and I import the OBJ cape too. I make sure the cape OBJ is the same size scale as the character FBX, and I attach the cape as a child of the character, then attach a cloth component to the cape. Next, edit the constraints that attach the cape to the neck (and sometime shoulders too). Usually the default settings will work fairly well, and the cape works at that point, but colliders still need to be set up so the cape doesn’t just hang inside the character or go through it. That’s where my problems are, I’ve gotten it to work before but not every time. Often the colliders I add for the cape interfere with the character controller, and/or they don’t keep the cape from going through the character model. I hope some of this was helpful to someone, I’ll try to post a screenshot or any new (successful) information I get if Cloth Components are still an issue for anyone here.