Cycles - Nodes, or rig to control transparency of objects simultaneously?

Support Materials and Textures
1

I’ve scoured for a solution to make an object or group (not the individual materials) fade in and out of transparent with one control with no luck. I’ve really only ever used cycles on my more complex endeavors so what i found seemed simple in BI…

Some of my meshes have 7-10 materials in them. Then I have a group of about 50 objects that I want to be able to control the transparency simultaneously using nodes or a control bone or something. Does anyone have a tip on how to control the transparency of this larger group of objects using compositing or material nodes or even ipo a bone to do it?

I’ve done a previous scene and white knuckled it through keyframing dozens of materials. I did another where i used render layers and alpha over. A little easier but basically doubled my render times since i needed the ground textures to receive the shadows for the incoming and outgoing fade. I’m rambling but thanks in advance for any ideas!

2

if you want to animate multiple materials at the same time, the easiest way is to do this inside of a node group… you can either have the whole BSDF structure in this node group or just a value, its up to you… but nodegroups are the way to go…

http://i.imgur.com/9yCqaIq.png
9yCqaIq.png1234×788

3

To Clarify, this node group would sit at the end of all your materials that you want to be animated together