just thinking out loud, but if you are wanting to have the trailing bits dynamic, I would do some trailing bits on the static skeleton, then ‘bake’ them to it. Then use something like a matrix object to asign positions over the skeleton mesh, then do the XP stuff from there? So the skeleton mesh has the look of the branches over it, but they are just stuck geo, then on top of that you have dynamic floating bits too. Or use hair module and a painted vertex map?