How to rip NPC models from Destiny 2 for fan art and reference purposes!
For this tutorial, you will need:
Destiny 2 installed on your computer
Blender 4.0 or later
The latest version of Charm
The latest version of the D2 Blender Importer addon
Note that this tutorial is intended for those with working knowledge of the basic usage and functions of Blender. If you're brand new to the software, there are plenty of great tutorials out there on youtube and other sites. Personally I would recommend Grant Abbitt's tutorials, he's the one I learned from the most when I was new to Blender.
This is also not the only or definitive or even necessarily the best way of doing this. It's just what I have found works best for me with trial and error.
Image-heavy tutorial below the cut!
If you don't already have Charm installed, the first part of this video goes over installing and setting it up, so I won't cover that here.
Once Charm is installed, open it up and you should see the main menu.
Select the "Dynamics" tab.
It will probably take a bit of time to load, especially the first time you open it. Just let it finish and you should see a screen like this. In the text box in the top left corner, search for whatever character you want to export. In our case, we'll be looking for our renegade failson Dredgen Bael.
Usually NPCs will show up in either a "NPCs" or "Cinematics" category. Sometimes they will show up in multiple categories, as there are variations and duplicates in the files. In this case Bael's models are in the same category but there are two of them, with slight differences.
One of them has his Praxic Blade included, while the other has a more complex rig. If you can't see the rig, make sure "has skeleton" is "true" and that "Show skeleton" above the model preview is checked. We will be exporting the second one for this tutorial. Make sure "Apply texture" and "Export entity children" are checked and click "Export Current". The files will be exported to wherever you chose when setting up Charm.
Now open up Blender and use the D2 Blender Importer addon to import the CFG file that was exported.
And the rigged model should show right up!
Now the tedious part, setting up materials.
Bael's model imported with the diffuse map properly connected but not the other texture maps. We will have to do those manually. Note that this is different from how you would set up player gear materials, which is showcased in the video linked above!
As you can see there are a number of textures that were imported, but for a basic material setup we will primarily need three of them: the diffuse, metallic/roughness/AO, and the normal map. If you're not sure which is which, the diffuse is the regular color image, the metallic/roughness/AO will be red/green/blue (sometimes partially transparent, and if the material has some emissive/glowy quality it might even be mostly transparent), and the normal map will be a light purple. The other image textures included are used for further details in the material but we will be ignoring those to keep things simple for this tutorial.
Here is an example of a very basic material setup. Breakdown:
Diffuse color: Pretty straightforward. Plug this into the "A" input of a Mix Color node set to Multiply, and then plug that node into the Base Color input of the Principled BSDF.
Metallic/Roughness/AO: Each of these is packed into one color channel of the image, so we will use a Separate Color node to get each one individually.
Red: Metallic. Plug this right into the metallic input of the Principled BSDF.
Green: Roughness. Plug this right into the roughness input of the Principled BSDF.
Blue: AO (ambient occlusion). Plug this into the "B" input of the Mix Color node with the diffuse color. The factor (blend amount) can be whatever you think looks nice.
If there are any parts of the material that are supposed to glow, like the buttons on Bael's belt, you would use the Alpha output for the emission strength on the Principled BSDF and the diffuse color texture for the emission color.
Normals: Make sure this is plugged into a Normal Map node, and then that is plugged into the normal input of the Principled BSDF. Do not plug it straight into the shader!
There are multiple materials per model so make sure you do this for each of them. Then you should have your NPC ready to go!
Misc notes:
If you can't find an NPC model in the Dynamics tab, try checking in the Named Bags tab. In that case you will want to search for the activity or location they appear in. Orin's Emissary form, for example, cannot be found by searching "Orin" or "Emissary" in the Dynamics tab, but if you go into the Named Bags tab and search for the Prophecy dungeon, she can be found as "trials_vendor_scaled".
The material setup is going to vary from NPC to NPC. We got lucky in that Bael's materials were very straightforward but some NPCs will have more complicated shader node setups. (Lodi for example needed a bit of wrangling to get the patterns on his clothes to show up)
If something looks off with the textures double check the Color Space and Alpha settings of the image texture nodes. Diffuse textures should have their Color Space set to sRGB and their Alpha to Channel Packed. Metallic/Roughness/AO and Normals should have their Color Space set to Non-Color Data.
If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask and I will do my best to answer!
my fellow queers. happy pride month. Past 2 years ive made pride headers for diff flags but i didnt have time this year (due to recent news) so i made one big flag à la NASA. Tried to cover most destinations in D2!
@creekfiend was very kind in sharing some writing resources with me, and I thought I'd pass along the kindness by listing them down below.
N.K. Jemisin's article 'Describing characters of color in writing'
Mary Anne Mohanraj's article on approaching characters of colour
Renee Harleston's article How to 'Write Characters of Color Without Using Stereotypes'
Working with Colour, a resource site for writers
the book Writing the Other by by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, which had a description that cut deep, because I've definitely fallen into this trap out of fear:
and then a video recommended by @sheprd (thank you!) about pitfalls in descriptive language
if anyone else has more resources to add, feel free to reblog with them! this is something I want to learn more about.
I was talking yesterday about how I should probably change the skin colour of a character in a not-yet-written book, because that character is a large, aggressive dragon-shifter and I was worried about her being read with unintentional and offensive subtext.
I haven't gotten my hands on Writing the Other yet (it's still in the mail!) but from reading my way through these articles and watching the Princess Weekes video, I now understand that 'white-ifying' a character you're worried about is a lazy and cowardly solution. so, if I do ever finish the book Eres loses Everything, I'll keep her as is, do my best to be thoughtful, and hire a sensitivity reader to pick out any blind spots.
thank you to everyone who passed on resources, I really appreciate it!
