Season 2 of blood Bowl is on the way with new rules and teams, it seems G-dubs have been busy during the pandemic.
Chief among these new teams is the Black Orc team, which seems to be a slightly less good version of Lizardmen.
And they’re good, everything I had grievance with about the 2016 Orc team they’ve largely resolved, plus there’s a selection of heads for that oh so crucial variety. I’m also intrigued by the fact that Varag Ghoul-Chewer seem to be included in the box, and Griff makes an appearance in the new human team. I wonder if this means there’ll be some provision for team captains in Blood Bowl 2020
And a better look at those Black Orc boys, the 2016 orc team were a mess of raggedy spiked armour plates and confusing silhouettes. These guys have come from a place of design principles. They also have the classic big orc-y heads, I wonder if they’re interchangeable with other orc sets.
I have now got a semi-functional set up that I can do Blender on, so I think at the very least I’ll push through and model one orc using the latest head I made way back in last year, and then we’ll see. Technically If I’ve got one I can easily do the rest, although that does hinge on me actually learning more Blender.
Interestingly I am now using Blender 2.83. Blender 2.8 offered a fair bit of resistance, because in Blender 2.7 there’s a Maya mode, which overwrites Blender’s default shortcut keys to be in line with Maya’s, and that’s what I always used, having come from Maya. But it’s not just shortcuts, it’s the navigational control scheme too. Blender 2.8 doesn’t have this, so jumping in was a tad difficult.
However I have now managed to get things to my liking. One of my big issues with Blender controls is that to move a selection (or scale or rotate) you press the appropriate shortcut, and you are then in ‘move mode’ pressing the letter key corresponding to that axis will lock you to movement along that axis. This requires you to know which axis you want to move along, this is particularly a pain for rotation, because the axis you want tends not to be the one you think. And of course, this is a one time operation, once you confirm you move you are no longer in move mode, so you have to hit the shortcut again.
Well it turns out there is a way to have what Blender refers to as Gizmos, but are variously refereed to as widgets or manipulator tools, viable. That is a three pronged arrow you can grab hold of to move things about the place, and grabbing the arrow corresponding to the axis moves only along that axis. This is vastly superior to the press the letter method, because they cease to be axis, and they become: ‘I want to move it that way’ As of yet I’ve not found a way to toggle between move, rotate and scale gizmos, but you can have them all on at once which does get a little bit confusing, but it mostly works.
Other than that, I only use two other tools for modelling, so I have memorised the shortcuts. E for Extrude, and Ctrl+R to add an edge loop, and I’m now using Blender the Blender way, sort of.
There’s also a Snotling team on the cards, excuse me while I change my trousers…