The regular cloth/soft body engine in C4D for cloth (check out rocket lasso for tuts on cloth, he’s got some good ones) then for gaseous and liquid sims, you’d probably have to turn to Blender, cause there isn’t a free plugin for that. The best method is to use the control modifier - xpscale and map the particle radius.
Once you check it you can set the size with a gradient. In the material editor there should be a checkbox that says age. Create a new xpartcles material and apply it to your emitter. In Cinema 4D R20, vertex maps became even more powerful in that now they can be animated. Right now i've got xp scale modifier but it doesn't seem to be doing anything. You’d have to get really familiar with thinking particles in C4D as a particle engine, or to a lesser extent you could use scene nodes in R23. From the course: Cinema 4D: X-Particles and Redshift Techniques. If you meant free alternatives (and I have a feeling you did) Then you’d have to use the tools built into C4D. Probably the best alternate for cloth would be marvelous designer, but I’d say XP is more an alternate for Marvelous than the other way around. It’s compatible with the existing particle modifiers, object. X-Particles is built seamlessly into Cinema 4D like it is part of the application. Designers can satisfy all their particle needs: Cloth, Smoke, Fire, Fluids, Grains & Dynamics from within a unified system. Alternatively You can use TurbulenceFD or Embergen to replace the gaseous simulation part of XP. Create beautiful & fun viscous fluid simulations using X-Particles in Cinema 4D. INSYDIUM's X-Particles is a fully featured advanced particle and VFX system.
Winbush uses a range of tools to get the job done with this two-part tutorial, starting with Cinema 4D, X-Particles and Redshift for rendering. Sam shows how you can determine the initial behaviour of liquid particles by changing the emitter type. Everything XP can do, houdini can do better, but not easier. Emitters are the building blocks of any simulation.