GameObject alpha fade in SteamVR

I am brand new to Unity and have been bumbling my way through my first project. I am creating a 360 video tour. The tour has objects that I want to fade on when I activate them at a certain time in the video playback. I am having trouble with the actual fade effect. I have tried just about everything I can think of and have been through so many forums and tried whatever I could find. The closest thing I have found has been this:

 public GameObject davidInterface;
 public float timer = 1;
 public float alpha = 0;
 Renderer r;

 // Use this for initialization
 void Start()
 {
     r = davidInterface.GetComponent<Renderer>();
 }
 // Update is called once per frame
 void Update()
 {
     float lerp = Mathf.PingPong(Time.time, timer) / timer;

     alpha = Mathf.Lerp(0, 1, lerp);
     Color color = r.material.color;
     r.material.color = new Color(color.r, color.g, color.b, alpha);

 }
 }

It isn’t exactly what I want, but the alpha on the material does fade in and out in the material preview during testing, but the actual object doesn’t change. I am using the standard shader with rendering mode set to fade. I have tried adjusting the alpha manually during testing, but it still doesn’t show up in the actual game, the alpha stays at whatever it was when I pressed play. Any ideas?

Update:

I had an animator component enabled on the gameObjects I was trying to fade. As soon as I disabled the animator I was able to adjust the alpha on my materials.