Sequential order on many multiple paths

[silly_savage]

Ok, looking to make my life easier here, perhaps you'll call it lazy, but I have a layer with many (c.800) masks generated by auto-trace from an RGB matte render which I will stroke with a path. It looks like the below - basically a town-scape of many different outlines of buildings.

Now the strokes of course currently appear in the order they were generated and as such the order they are stacked in the layer. What I'd like, if possible is to generate them radially outwards from a few key points. This can probably be done with masks, but I'd like to retain that look of the stroke running around the paths, rather than just a mask revealing them. 

Is there some sensible way of doing this, like an expression to begin stroking the path if encompassed by another shape, for example.
The long way would be mannually ordering all the masks to my desired order of course. 

[Mylenium]

Effects --> Generate --> Vegas on a layer that is masked with an expanding circle and then potentially another layer on top with a slightly larger circle to clean it all up. Point in case: You really don't need masks, you just need contours and if you already have an RGB matte, surely there's enough room to extract channel components. That and of course you can easily do it in 3D as well by rendering a custom pass with a distance-based shader or other falloff or even create the full animation with e.g. Sketch & Toon in Cinema 4D.

Mylenium

[silly_savage]

Thanks, I hadn't thought about the Vegas effect. I'll try it now.

doing it all in 3D is an option, but I've not found a good way to recreate the 'hand drawn look' as well as I can achieve in AE with turbulant displace and roughen edges.

[Mylenium]

I guess it depends on what "hand-drawn" means, but we used to do such stuff even way back then in 1995 with displacment maps and wireframe renders and as I mentioned, Sketch & Toon would have a ton of such stuff built in as no doubt have other toon shader systems in other 3D programs.

Mylenium

[silly_savage]

Yep loads, and it's something I want to experience with more, but not on this project. I think manually ordering the masks is going to be the way to go