Creating a simple wood texture
 

I have alot of fence poles I need to place textures on to make them look like they're made of wood. I won't UV map them, because they all have a slightly different shape and it would take ages to do them all. So I tried to use the default wood texture in Maya, but no matter how much I mess with the settings it looks really unnatural. So maybe anyone here have a few tips for me?

sure! spend the time UV MAP THEM! mike's got a good tutorial up showing how to do the texture for a whole door (made of a few differently-sized wooden planks) at once... maybe you could watch that video and save yourself a headache

Click here for tutorial

you have to UV map them. Even if they are a slightly different shape, if they all have the same number of vertices and edges and so on, you can use the same UV Map. The problem is that if you don't, you end up with a tangled web of death as your UV map and you'll get nothing sensible out in terms of textures when you try to apply one. For posts you might be able to use cylindrical or auto mapping and get reasonable results without doing anything else.

even a simple planar map along the whole fence would do it if you attached all your fence planks into one mesh.