How many of you would like open robes making it possible to see clothing/light armor underneath the robe? I think it would be great, honestly. I'm tired of robes that look like straight jackets and also seem like they're part of your body. With an open robe it would seem more, fluid I guess, as you run or turn or whatever.

Secondly, how about some robes, or other clothing, made of animal fur. Maybe as a part of smithing, if not smithing possibly a new feature? I figure each defeated enemy, that has fur, you can skin it and accumulate X amount of fur in order to make a piece of clothing/robe out of. I think this would be cool. And not just fur either...maybe other items to go along with the clothing/robe. Such as bones, as seen on the giant, symbols etc. etc....

What do you guys think?

While that does sound nice, it'd be a nightmare to implement. You'd have to model the robes to fit over any type of armor or clothing that a person might wear. Since some armors are bulkier than others, the robe would have to fit the bulky ones, leaving it looking way too big over the lighter armors/clothes. It'd also probably be a lot of work to deal with clipping issues, as well. So, yeah, it probably wouldn't work very well.

It would be nice, but I think it would be too much to implement right now.

Great principle as so many things are but alas this would be increadibly hard to do and i can see it now, my manly hairy burly nord will be wearing a robe and walks and a gust of air flows over him and he goes oooohhhhhhhhh and pushes his robes down,that will make the villagers and dragons realize how scary and dangerous you are

Hm... Idk. All they need to do is have robes/coats/capes/cloaks scale/stretch(instead of having a fixed model) to fit overtop of whatever clothing you have on, and let the player decide if it looks good.

Easier said than done. What you're asking for is essentially a really precise implementation of Havok Cloth, which demands a good chunk of memory. Consoles probably couldn't handle it.

Right, consoles. Well armour and clothing models have fixed sizes depending on race, or they do in Oblivion. So couldnt the game just read what youre wearing and adjust the "overcloak" to stretch over it? I thought it would be more a matter of reading the XYZ of vertex/polygons of whats underneath and making that +1 the size of the cloak/coat. Or something, I only ever took animation in highschool and most of that class was spent playing Guildwars.

I thought Havok was a physics engine.

I don't know about you, but I'd prefer that we keep those robes closed. The game will be M-rated, not AO.

Besides, that's what mods are for.

What do you think realistic cloth behavior relies on?

Well similar to flex effect thats was in Oblivion but was hardcoded and don't work on skinned objects?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R73n6Huu7fg
Tapestries, chains, roots, ropes, and ground models for certain clothing has it, effect can be seen in NifScope but cannot be added to riged meshes.
Anyway there is also another good old way to make cloaks and hairs move without need of resource hungry procedural cloth simulation
Thats is animations added to special cloth and hair bones, such way work very well when animation blending is good and according to words of developers animation blending was greatly improved over previous games.

Maybe its too complicated but fur as an armor or apparel is way under rated I always killed that [censored] Kajit on that bridge first just for his armor it just looks cool having claws on your knuckles

I'd like to see Khajiit fur robes or Argonian leather armour. Even human and eleven skin would be interesting. It wouldn't make you very popular around town I'd imagine...

All examples in Oblivion were hand animated. Real cloth behavior requires a good physics simulator.

Well not all examples, since tapestries, chains, roots, ropes and ground models for certain clothing use procedural animations but not cloth physics, thats is not real cloth simulations but can be such flex simulation used on riged models?

About hand animated examples since Skyrim has now more productive tools to create animations and better animations blending why not add such features for NPC actors and PC not only for creatures?