I want to create a simulation of leaves blowing in the wind using blender v2.72, just like this tutorial (archive).
My problem is, I can't get the wind force field to act on the cloth simmed leaves once they are emitted by a particle emitter. nHere is a breakdown of what I tried to get the wind blowing.
I created a plane (at 0,0,0) as a particle emitter, adjusted the number of particles to 20, set the start and end frames to 1 and adjusted the lifetime to 2000. Under velocity, I set random to 0.2. I then set the physics to off ("No" in the settings) and switched off the rendering of particles.
I created another plane (also at 0,0,0) to act as the leaf mesh, subdivided it a few times in edit mode, applied a particle instance modifier to it, and selected the emitter plane as the object, I also checked "size" in the "create from" field to make the leaves smaller. After this, I applied cloth simulation to this "leaf" plane.
I then created a ground plane, scaled it up to 2, placed it below the emitter plane at (0,0,-0.2) and applied collision physics to it.
At this stage, hitting play results in the "leaves" realistically falling down onto the ground plane with cloth physics working.
The problem is I then can't get a wind force (in the physics tab) to act upon the leaves. I tried adding an empty and applying a wind force field to it, but no matter where this wind field is directed and no matter how strong I make it, the leaves don't react to it.