Quote Originally Posted by 5TonsOfFlax
I'll defer to rachil0 on specific physics simulations. All I was saying was that the effect in the video appeared to not even attempt physics, but rather just redistributed nodes according to a simple formula.

Let's say you have 5 nodes between the anchor and the end node. You could define them to be at 95, 90, 80, 60 and 30 percent of the way from anchor to end in the y dimesion and evenly space in x. Then apply these percentages to x and y independently to position your nodes each time the end node moves. It's not physics based, but it should give an effect much like the video. The nodes lie along a curve (or line) which is merely scaled according to the bounding box defined by the anchor and end.
This makes some sense as well. I'll have to play around with both methods, but I think I'm more familiar with springs.

The movements would just be applied to the leader node and all the nodes between would just follow naturally, correct? That way I could create a list of movements (or attack patterns) for the arm, which would really just be sets of instructions for the leader node to follow. Right?