branched curve guides (still open for suggestions)

I’ve already put it in the feature requests, but does anyone have a better solution to create a branched curve guide effect without having to create a new emitter for each branch point?
I have a dupliverted particle set representing a bunch of bubbles flowing through some pipe. I don’t want to recreate particles and guides for each segment - the curve guides add too much calculation time for previewing animation/timing. (This isn’t the only particled element of the scene.)
example:
http://www.geocities.com/dsch57035/blender/branch.png
excuse the rudeness of the drawing, but I hope you get the idea.

You can put multiple curves starting in the same spot then use mindist, maxdist, and falloff to mimic some flowing on each curve like

(3(2(1)2)3)

using min dist so their influence circles (or in this case donuts) don’t overlap.

I managed to use this method to get particles going on 3 curves using this method off one emitter.

I can’t get it to work…can u send a .blend? deschnell at gmail.com

Like for example. You set use max distance in the curve guide buttons and set falloff to the max. Say you have 3 curves.

Curve 1

Mindist = 0
Maxdist = 1
falloff (for all three) = 10

Curve 2

Mindist = 1
Maxdist = 2
falloff = 10

And so on.

dschnell289: I tried Icoxo’s technique and it works. It is essential to have the start points of the curves snapped to exactly the same spot. Also you will have to tweak the influence values, especially MaxDist. It helps to observe your particle system in static mode.

Here is a junky .blend I made following Icoxo’s advice. It has 3 curves affecting a particle system and the particles are dividing themselves among the curves:
http://www.savefile.com/files/2355183

And I did pretty much all of it in 5 minutes. That’s how quick ideas sometimes go in my head :wink:

thanks guys
I need more technical knowledge about min, max distances and falloff I guess for these guides.
Now I need to find a way to do it wihtout adding curve guides…that’s where I think the cpu power hiccup is…