This was a project for a small robotics company that wanted a small ad / sting for their online presence. The only brief was that their slogan was going to be 'Bringing Robotics to Life' so it was only a small step to have a robot building from nothing and finally coming alive. You can see the final animation here https://vimeo.com/53672164. There was nothing particularly special or clever about the animation, it was just brute force keyframing of visibility and position. There were a number of blend shapes for the wire growth too. I was originally going to use a NURBs extrusion along a curve that would have been much easier to animate but the texturing and animation stages overlapped a little so it was easier in the end to go with blend shapes.
As there were a lot of little metal pieces that needed nice reflections, everything was lit with a HDRI and there was a little grade added afterwards in After Effects. For the first time I tried DoF from within Maya. I really don't think it's worth the extra render time and amount of pre render checks you have to do. The one tip I did get out of it though was creating a more visible DoF. I linked two locators to a distance between node and plugged this value into the DoF focal distance. It gives a nice way to control and animate the focal distance of your camera although obviously you still need to keep an eye on your F-stop.
As there were a lot of little metal pieces that needed nice reflections, everything was lit with a HDRI and there was a little grade added afterwards in After Effects. For the first time I tried DoF from within Maya. I really don't think it's worth the extra render time and amount of pre render checks you have to do. The one tip I did get out of it though was creating a more visible DoF. I linked two locators to a distance between node and plugged this value into the DoF focal distance. It gives a nice way to control and animate the focal distance of your camera although obviously you still need to keep an eye on your F-stop.