Best way for creating animated sails

Development Character & Animation
1

I was trying to make animated sails for a while. Animation should include fold/unfold, wind depended animations. And ofcourse is should look good and smouth. I’m curiuous what will be the best way to do it : static mesh/ skeletal mesh/ (maybe cloth system)/or maybe some other way ?

  1. is to use sail as static mesh and try to do some kinda deforms animation inside of unreal. Is this approach have sense at all?

  2. make skeleton in blender and make both wind and fold/unfold animations. But it doesn’t sound good to me (maybe I’m wrong). You know, what bones sail could have? that is silly

  3. cloth system is good in wind depend animations, but I didn’t find a way to do fold/unfold. I tried combine cloth together with skeleton animations - it break the mesh :

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    maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me, that cloth system can’t work properly together with skeleton animation. Is there any way of making fold/unfold with cloth system?

Any other ideas? suggestions?
Will be glad for yours opinions

2

there are a bunch of ways to bring in a sail mesh and animate it, skeletal mesh probably is the easiest for the engine and more predictable, could probably do it with controlrig

running cloth after the bones could get costly for runtime,

cheapest for game engine is probably VAT animations, where you’ll have to build something custom to what look you’re trying to achieve