I saw a tutorial vid recently, in which a guy using 3ds added a a root bone to a plane and then a cloth bone and imported it into UE4 and just tweaked a few stats and then the plane was completely cloth simulating in the engine. If I do that in Blender, will it work, or is it some kind of a hidden feature in 3ds ?
I think he surely used nvidia apex -> you can also do it with blender: 
As points out this needs to be done with the Nvidia’s standalone cloth tool (in the linked video) or using the DCC Plugin’s for 3DS or Maya.
While cloth simulations can be done with most/any 3d modeling program, they will simply be animations and not using real-time cloth unless they are using APEX Cloth from Nvidia.
If you have access to 3Ds you can download the Nvidia PhysXLab 3Ds plugin from Developer.Nvidia when you sign up for a free account. It’s certainly much easier to use the PhysXLab plugin than to use the standalone clothing tool provided in the APEX SDK.