Current member status:

[cobair]

This might be totally obvious but I cant find an easy solution so I need some help. I've built a Cyclotron in Maya for a project I'm doing. It consists of multiple objects with different textures applied. Some of these objects are grouped together (eg - door). Now what I want to do is animate the opacity of the door as a whole (remember its made up of multiple objects and textures). Is there an easy way to do this? ...surely I don't have to animate each component separately??

[Gen]

The opacity of the object depends on the shader(which I'm taking you're referring to as texture) so there wouldn't be a master control for the opacity of all the shaders assigned to objects in any given group. You can create this though. Add a custom attribute to the group node and use that attribute to drive the shaders' opacities using 'set driven keys'.

[stwert]

You can key things in the attribute spread sheet (yay!)... so select all your materials and open the attribute spread sheet to key the opacity all together.