Animating same transperency on bjects w/ different shaders

[loganb]

I just completed an animated interface project, where columns of polyplane images move and fade in and out as the user navigates.

To do this I ended up animating 21 separate shaders' transparency as required.
since each column basically needed the same transparency, I thought there might be better a way to do this.
I would have liked to animate a few shader attributes for the whole group, wile leaving each polyplane's basic image as it is.

is there a way to animate the transparency (or ambient color etc...)of a group of objects,
leaving their individual shaders untouched?

[thnkr]

No, visibility in Maya is a Boolean attribute, not a float like in some other apps.

[joojaa]

Well while Duvekot's answer is correct the scope of the answer does not really answer the asker.

Theres few things. Mayas a dependency graph, so theres nothing that states all the 21 shaders need to have a separate transparency, they can all be connected to one attribute in essence making it one thing to animate 21 shaders in one go. Alternatively theres really no reason why youd need 21 shaders you can use a tripple shading switch to connect a different image to each plane wihilst maintaing it all in one shader.