I looked on the forums but didn’t see much about this. I’m trying to export out .FBX files from Max to unity for some FX files but I can’t find a way to export the texture alpha value with the meshes so can keyframe the fade in/out in max. Sounds like it’s not possible and I’ll have to do it with scripts but I was hoping someone might have found a work around? So much quicker to set up the timing of the fx in Max. (for me anyways) Thanks!
You could animate the opacity using Unity’s Animation Editor:
Thanks dude! I’ll play around with this method. 
Or you can do what mikamobile does, and have a bone at ground height called alpha, and then you can animate this bone up and down to get a direct correlation between bone Y pos and your desired alpha. You can extend this to support R, G, B and also even a texture swap.