I will be using a great many wooden parts, in animations, and would like to have slight variations in the color and grain pattern. Is there a way to do this easily, or do I need to texture each piece by itself? As an example 100 2x4’s in a pile with various shades and ring structure. This would make the building animation much easier.
For color variation you can use the random per object output from the object info node to alter the the color through for example a HSV node.
Also geometry/random per island is immensely useful.