Good way of animating material?

Hi!

I would like to know if there’s a good way of animating the visibility of a material?

What I basically need to do is hide specific parts of a skeletal rig that is assigned a particular material at a particular time in several different animations, and then show them at particular times as well.

In hindsight I realise it might have been a better idea to hide these parts of the character by giving them their own joint and then scaling that joint down to 0 in Maya whenever I needed to hide them, but it’s unfortunately too late for that now.

Any help on this would be very much appreciated!

Thank you.

Then there is always the “hidebonebyname” node…