2 part idea: Fade in-out option and Matieral Grouping

Part 1: Blender doesn't have an easy way to do a simple fade-in or out effect and something like that would be nice to have. Where you can key frame it and have options like (Dissolve Fade) where it shows like spots as it comes in, or like (Standard Fade) a regular 0% opacity to 100% opacity. Just having a opacity slider in general would be nice to control the level of transparency, it could make for some very cool effects.

Part 2: Blender also has an issue with Material animation. During my project i was working on, i ran into the issue of being unable to group materials together and apply an animation to all of them without doing each one by one. (only ran into this issue because of the fade effect, but i could see others doing something complicated with materials and needing this too!)