Gonna post some ongoing research with the Soft Body modifier in C8.5
I spent a couple of free weekends playing with this feature, and what I am feeling is that the Soft Body is AWESOME 
...and the Scene Forces are poo! 
I made some very elaborate animation sequences using Directional Force (somewhat stable), and Flow Force (which sometimes worked and sometimes killed the whole sim).... and the problem with these forces is that they don't look like wind at all.... Hard to explain in words, although I can visualize what the problem is....
Scene forces, unlike wind, do not have any differentiation in air pressure. It's not "really" a volume of air containing variations in high and low pressures... the 3D equivelent might be like a cellular shader "noise" that moves across the scene, gently lifting one edge of the fabric, then the middle, then the end... again and again to create troughs and peaks like a wave....
Instead what happens is that all the volume of the scene ramps up as one force: instead of a puff of smoke moving through air, it is like pushing or twisting a brick - all the scene feels the force at once. There is no fall off or variation within the "volume", so applying a Directional Force to a soft body looks as if the entire scene is held in a force field and and lifted or rotated as one giant solid. This makes the fabric move unnaturally.
I got really NICE results simply moving the whole scene through space, parenting the lights and camera to my attach object (in this case the flagpole) and creating a path for the whole scene to follow (well, I used tweeners to move all the objects in a syn wave pattern, but hopefully you understand the idea...)I'll try to post more as I have time....
Did you need to accellerate/decellerate the scene to get the effect, or perhaps the tweener did that?
This was the start of my hate for the scene forces....There aren't any material settings, so we don't get any shortcuts... I just poked around to try to figure out what the settings do.
I'll show you two test renders. This is before I started to try to get the flag to "blow" with Scene Forces.... When the sim starts it snaps down by the pull of gravity, and also I think some kind of internal elastic... that first few seconds of "settling" in the sim is very strong and the fabric can "snap" in a way that is *not* like the rest of the sim.... So the first few seconds can be misleading...
Anyway, in the video you first see something that looks very rubbery and bouncy with no air dampening..., and then a higher "quality" setting which turns up the detail - the cloth is better at pushing itself - and also air dampening turned on so you see the cloth "slice" around some air pockets....
You know I did some fairly extensive work with this when the C8.5 beta was first release, but that was 2 years ago. What I found was it works greate for draping clothes in a static pose, and little else.
You have to treat direction force like a wind. You have to make minor changes to speed and direction every few frames. Direction force and flow force are a couple of features DAZ has yet to do anything with; which may be a good thing, but they have remaind unchanged since I got carrara{C5}.
And your clothing tests look identical to mine. I never rendered any out because I counted all my trys as failures with no need to render. But this ball test made me wonder why.
So here are a few tests and a sample render using the FORCES technique to create wind fx.
I had to use Directional Force because Flow Force caused the flag to break it's connection to the pole and disappear into the sunset....
The first 4 partial renders are me trying different settings for gravity, ramping up the direction force with bezier tweener, or an oscilate tweener to "pump" it on, or a noise tweener to vary the strength randomishly.... Eventually worked out a long (over 1 min) simulation that *almost* looks good. But As I said earlier I think this technique is flawed. In the early tests you can see how the Force will "lock" the cloth all at once as if it's caught it a force field.... I also oscilated the rotation of the force (like a rotating desk fan) to get some folds into it....
I got some good still images out of it, but I wasn't too happy with the final animated render...
After being dissatisfied with the scene forces, I decided to try dragging the flagpole across the scene, and parenting the camera and lights so it appears to be still.
I jacked up Air Drag to 100% in this video. Lift oscilates between 80-100% (it's too subtle to tell really).
The flagpole moves steadily along the X axis, and it oscillates on the Y axis creating a syn wave motion. This helps to get the large ripples into the flag, although I'm not sure how necessary they are... More tests to follow.
There is an annoying jitter in the lower left corner of the flag 
again, more tests needed (maybe with a lower res flag), but I think you can see this fabric movement is MUCH more interesting.... Definitely on the right path here.
Wind-blowing Rocker Andrei's hair was going to be the next step, but this has got me thinking too. The simulation and forces could in fact be very good, but the implementation in the scene might need some tuning.
For instance, Carrara provides a nice, convenient-looking interface for pinning a soft body to another object like a rigid body. (I say convenient-looking because it crashed on me when I tried using it, taking freshly modeled flagpole and flag with it. C'est la vie.)
But think about it—that's not how flagpoles tend to work in real life. The iconic flag flapping in the breeze connects to the flagpole by a long cord on a pulley, so that colors can be struck when you need to take them in for the night. The soft-body flag would be attached to another soft-body, the cord, which would be free to whip around as well, and that would affect the dynamics. That's the approach I'm going to take when I model this experiment myself.
The one edge of the flag might also not be stretched taut on the cord, but have a little bit of give. And even in cases where the flag is attached more directly to the flagpole, it's using a carabiner or clip of some sort. But first things first.
(This reminds me of the "Nice Dice" thread in the old Carrara discussion. Good times...)
All the youtube videos seem to be replaced by the video on how to go from Carrara to Blender.
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