Separate Curves by Loose Parts

I am looking to model something like this:
http://www.shaynaleib.com/glass-sculptural/burga.php

My thought is to use the hair particle system to get the paths. Use the Convert button on the modifiers tab to convert all the strands to poly data. From there convert the mesh to bezier curves. Then from a base “Hair model” duplicate it for each strand and apply the curve modifier to make it jump to the strand location and bend accordingly.

I figure I will have to write a little python script to duplicate and apply the curve modifier, but I don’t see how to easily separate the individual strands into individual objects after converting them to bezier curves.

Any ideas on how to do that, or even a better approach to the problem?

Just make them separate by lose parts after you’ve converted them to poly data, and then you convert them to curve data once they’re all selected. I think there’s a way to assign the data of an active curve to all the other ones to give it’s thickness to them, but I’m not sure how.

Try using a macro to assign values to your curves, or to separate them.

By macro do you mean writing a python script? Is there an easy way to execute a script on the selected objects without having to write an explicit loop into the python code?

I just gave you a suggestion. You should probably ask for help in the coding section (http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?11-Python-Support) of this community about this. I’m not very good with python, sorry.

600k faces, particle instance modifier

untitled.blend (1.76 MB)