Adding variety through Actions

OK so now that we have a wooden plank, we would certainly like to use it to produce several planks with it and not only a whole set of planks that look all exactly the same. We would like some texture and color variations. We can achieve that through Actions.

My purpose, here is not to show how to use action to animate material attributes so I won't go into details but here are the basic steps:

I created 3 Action named "Wood Scale", "Wood Translate" and "Wood Color" for my Planck model. In the Wood Scale and Wood Translate Actions, I drop all the "Spherical" nodes of both the "Wood Color" and "Wood Bump" material. In the "Wood Scale" Action, I modified only the Scale of the Sphericals in order to get larger textures as I move in the action. Note that for Scale attributes in Action must be divided by 100 so for instance a Z scale of 20000 would be entered as 200. I did the same type of adjustments to my Sphericals translation values in the "Wood Translate" Action.

Now, for the "Wood Color" action. This is a little bit trickier because we can't see the color we enter in an Action. So instead of blindly adjusting the RGB values of all the 6 attributes of my "Wood Color" material, I took a shortcut. I added a new attribute to the "Wood Color" material root and set the "Falloff" to 100. Then, in my "Wood Action" I simply adjusted this Falloff value.

Then, in choreography, I dropped several copies of the Plank and placed them appropriately. Then I dropped the Actions on each plank and set their "Crop Range" "Start" and "End" values at some arbitrary frame. The render is what you see here.

And through tweeking the actions a little more and adding bevels to the planks, we get this.