tySplines merging and how to hide portions of spline

[ilmelovfx]

Hi all,

I'm animating particle trajectories with tySpline in a quite complex model (a lot of pipes and tubes), and I'm trying to find a way to semplify things, so I'm thinking to merge all the splines in one big spline.

1 - SPLINES MERGING/SPLITTING : Is there a way to add more splines so the particles follows the branches (the light blue spline in the attached wireframe example) ? In other words, is there a way to split the main spline in various branches and make the particles follow all the branches? Here I used a pathFollow but if I add more than one spline to it the particles just follow the first/main one...

2 - HIDE : Is there a way to cut or hide a portion of the tySPline mesh (see the rendered window in the attached image)? In this case I tried vrayClipper but it doesnt work, what you see in the image is the final effect I would like to achieve, the tySpline must be obscured when passing through a custom mesh (two cubes in the example image)...

Thank you for your help

[tyFlow]

To be honest I'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve here....

Have you experimented with the Spawn or Branch operators in order to generate child splines from a parent?

[ilmelovfx]

Imagine a flow of air inside a pipe (stylized), I used tySpline to convert particles trajectories into splines to give idea of air flow and move the particles/tySplines along a path (with pathfollow). But the path that I have to make the splines follow is really complex and splits and branches various times, so I was thinking to draw a single spline to make all the entire path (including the subpaths for the splits and branches) and using a single tyFlow for all the path (instead of one tyflow for every single path, because there are 30-40 paths now).
If I merge the various paths into one single spline, tyflow's pathfollow follows only the first/main spline (not the attached sub-splines).
Second, because sometimes the splines goes through some kind of machinery or valve the path must temporarly interrupt, so the better way to me is to use some kind of "cutter geometry" to hide the trajectories (so I can still use one tyflow for all the tysplines trajectories, and in the same time create "gaps"/"holes" where I need them).
I hope now it's clearer
As you suggest, I will try Spawn or Branch and I wiil see if I can use more than one spline to make the particles follow splits and branches, thank you.

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Ok, I will study the "tyflow_pathfollow_001.max" in the Misc sample scenes folder, looks like something similar to what I have to achieve.