Does Unity2D has a way to do sprite effects like cocos2d

I want some fade in/out effects on my sprite
Is there any way to do this?
Such as this one

http://www.cocos2d-x.org/wiki/Effects

 

Fading is easy in Unity. Just change the SpriteRenderer.color alpha value.
Gradually reducing from 1f to 0f will fade out. Gradually increasing from 0f to 1f will fade in.

 

Looks like they make a grid mesh, and perform operations on the mesh. You can do that with the Mesh class in Unity (but it wouldn't be using Unity sprites per se).

--Eric