How to animate multiple lines I wonder what would be the best way of animating multiple 2 dimensional lines in blender.

Lets say I have lots of line, that are parallel and have some sort of rule, kind of like a PCB board with hundreds of circuits.

The starting frame would be when nothing is visible and during the animation the lines would slowly build up from nothing all the way to the end forming the finished lines.

I have a couple of ideas that might work, but all include heavy hand animation, like:


grease pencil animation, drawing them one by one, converting to curve, then build up modifier
some dynamic paint hack


There maybe other more efficient methods that I don't know of and if so, please let me know.
You can use Curves and animate the Start bevel and End Bevel factors:


  These options determine where to start the Bevel operation on the
  Curve being beveled. Increasing the Start Bevel Factor to 0.5 will
  start beveling the Curve 50% of the distance from the start of the
  Curve (in effect shortening the Curve). Decreasing the End Bevel
  Factor by 0.25 will start beveling the Curve 25% of the distance from
  the end of the Curve (again, shortening the Curve).


These settings are in Properties > Object Data > Geometry: