FIVEFORGE / Guides / FiveM Livery Template — Make Any Car Livery-Ready

Make any car livery-ready

Most addon cars have no livery slot and no usable UV, so a livery is impossible without remapping them. This does the remap for you — pick the panels, get a clean template, paint it, and export a car with working livery slots.
Why liveries fail on most addon carsHow the remap worksFrom upload to installed liveryLiveries that vanish at distanceFAQ

Why liveries fail on most addon cars

Two separate problems get confused with each other:

No livery slot. The game's livery system needs the model to have been built with slots and carvariations.meta entries. Most converted cars were not, so SetVehicleLivery has nothing to set.

No usable UV. Even with a slot, the body panels often share a generic tiling texture. Paint a logo and it repeats across the wheels, sills and grille — because the panels were never given their own UV space.

How the remap works

The panels you select get a fresh UV built from a six-view box projection — right, left, top, bottom, front, back — packed into one sheet. That is deliberately the same approach vanilla livery sheets use, and it is why the template is readable: each view is a recognisable outline of that side of the car, not a scatter of triangles.

An automatic angle-based unwrap (Smart UV Project and friends) produces roughly 1500 micro-islands on a car body. Technically a valid UV, completely undrawable. Livery unwrapping has to be projection-based.

The new UV is written to a second channel so the original texture coordinates, vertex colours and skinning survive untouched, and the shader is swapped to one that samples the livery layer over the body paint.

From upload to installed livery

  1. Load the unlocked car. The .yft files plus .ytd, or the whole resource .zip. Escrow (.fxap) cannot be edited.
  2. Pick the panels. Click them in 3D or select them from the bone tree — doors, hood, roof, quarter panels.
  3. Paint the template. The remapped car appears next to a layer-based editor with brush, fill, image import and free transform. The 3D preview updates live.
  4. Export. You get the car with livery textures in its .ytd, patched carvariations.meta and vehicles.meta, plus the flat template PNG for editing later in any image editor.

Liveries that vanish at distance

If a livery looks right up close and disappears a few metres away, only the high-detail body was remapped. The base .yft and the medium/low LOD groups carry the same panels and need the same remap with the same transform, otherwise the livery is dropped the moment the game switches LOD. That mirroring is done automatically here.

FAQ

Can I add a livery to a car that has no livery slot?

Yes. The panels you pick are given a fresh projected UV and the carvariations.meta is patched with livery slots, so the car becomes livery-ready even if it never shipped that way.

Why does my FiveM livery repeat across the whole car?

The body uses a generic tiling texture shared with wheels, sills and grille. The panels need their own UV space — that is exactly what the remap creates.

Why does my livery disappear at a distance?

Only the high-detail body was remapped. The base .yft and the medium/low LOD groups need the same remap, otherwise the livery is lost on LOD switch.

Can I edit the livery later in Photoshop?

Yes. The export includes the flat template PNG in the same orientation the game uses, so you can paint it in any editor and re-export.

Try it free

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Make a car livery →Debadge a FiveM car →Community showcase →