Animating branching curves
 

Hi there!

I'm trying to use the following curves:
http://imgur.com/Q6NdZ.jpg

to create an animated extrusion along each of them, progressively, so that the extruded tube starts with one at the bottom and ends up, after 240 frames, with 9 extrusions at the top.

I have figured out how to animate the extrusion, but right now am having to animate each of the 9 extrusions one by one. I need to make many unique variations of these curves & extrusions and was wondering if anyone has any tips on how to speed the process up.

For instance, is there a way to connect the curves at the intersections, then run one extrusion, then animate that once over time, or do I need to animate each branch of every set of curves individually?

Also, once created (with the animation), is there a way to copy the group and be able to move it, while still keeping the local animation of the 'growing' extrusions?

Thanks!

This is quite involved, especially if you would want the whole processs automated.
However if you allready have it set up so you can do it one by one to get the look, you can just use set driven key to drive the result for each extrustion.
Copying should be fine by using duplicate input graph in the duplicate special options.

An automated process wouldnt be too crazy but a lil bit of math would be needed, would be quite a neat thing to create.