Making a GTA 5 livery: template to stream-ready DDS

A vehicle livery is painted in 2D but worn in 3D — the bridge between them is the model's UV layout. Get a correct template and the rest is just painting; get a wrong one and your design lands on the wrong panels. Here's the whole loop.

Step 1 — generate the template from the .yft

Drop the vehicle's .yft into RageKit's Livery Generator — no game install required, it works entirely from loose files (sibling .ytd textures are picked up automatically). You get a textured 3D preview next to a rasterized UV template with an anti-aliased wireframe and a per-part colour legend, exportable up to 8192×8192.

Why modded cars break other template tools

Vanilla vehicles mark livery surfaces predictably; modded ones often don't. Many ship paint shaders with no livery texture bound at all, and their second UV channel — where liveries normally live — is frequently zero-filled junk. A tool that follows texture names or blindly uses UV channel 1 produces an unusable scribble for those cars. RageKit detects livery meshes by their shaders and picks the UV channel by measured quality, so vanilla, modded and clothing templates all come out usable. Duplicate LOD meshes are detected and dropped; mirrored panels that legitimately share template space are preserved.

Step 2 — paint with live reload

Export the template and paint in Photoshop, GIMP, Krita — whatever you use. With "reload on save" enabled, RageKit watches the file and rebinds it onto the 3D model within a second of every save, mapped through the exact UV channel the game will use. You see the design on the actual car while you work instead of alt-tabbing into the game.

Step 3 — export for streaming

DDS export is BC3-compressed with mipmaps, ready to stream in a FiveM resource as-is (PNG export is there too). One format note worth knowing: when a livery is written into an existing vehicle .ytd, RageKit enforces the single-mip policy vanilla liveries use — generated lower mips average across UV island borders and render as dirty seams at distance, so the game's own liveries ship mip 0 only.