key visibility for individual poly faces (maya)

Hello maya users,

Does anyone here know if its possible to Key (animate) individual Poly face visibility (ONE POLYGON face at a time on 1 whole polygonal object--for example making a nose vanish poly by poly on a polygon head). I want to animate a series of polygon faces disappearing. I can't separate the faces and key as individual poly objects because then the smooth will look segmented.

If that can not be done is it possible to key/animate individual poly face deletion. Even though I would rather key individual poly face visibility, keying the face deletion may work as well.

If anyone has done this, knows of a better way to achieve the effect, or knows how to key individual poly face visibility please let me know how (or where to find the attribute) and what version of maya you are running.

Thanks!

Interesting question, i don't know if it's possible, may be only through scripting.

What I would do is unwrap the model, export the UVs as an image then animate the texture in something like adobe after effects, then use the animation for transparency. Of course if you have huge amount of polygons this would be difficult to do but so will be keying each of them.

Here is an idea, I don't know really if it will work, but it doesn't hurt trying.

You can try lighting your object in such a way that his shading forms a black and white gradient in the direction you want polygons to disappear, bake this shading with the polygon smoothing removed, so that it results in quads of different shades, export and then play with adobe after effects or whatever compositing program you know to animate them from white to black. I would use levels or some kind of threshold effect for this.