the garden grows in both directions

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.