Fade in/out the objects (2)

Hello all,
I had to make a scene where the objects appear and desappear during the animation. The trouble is that the visibility in Maya, has only ON and OFF. How can I softly fade out an object? I mean, do I really need to animate the transparence, specularity, shaddow etc.?

Regards,

Perroud

Yes... but you can automate this by building a network to gandle 1 walue...
But ist not as simple as it seems.

Easier to render layares and fade on comp

Wow, it is still greek to me Do you know some online tutorial for this?
This comp was exactly what I did. In LW and Max its so simple, but in Maya I had to comp the seq in After. Well, its not the end, but it could be faster
thanks