How to make a FiveM vehicle in Blender with Sollumz 2.9

Tool	Version	Used for
Blender	4.2 or newer (Sollumz 2.9.0 sets 4.2 as its minimum; we use 5.2)	Modelling, rigging, export.
Sollumz	2.9.0	The add-on that reads and writes GTA V model files.
CodeWalker	Latest release	Browsing the game archives and extracting a stock vehicle to use as reference.
GTA V for PC		Source of the reference vehicle and the shared textures.

Sollumz installs as a Blender extension. In Blender go to Preferences > Get Extensions > Repositories > +, choose Add Remote Repository and enter https://repo.sollumz.org/, then search for Sollumz and install it. On first start the add-on asks to install its dependencies. Accept: one of them, PyMateria, is what lets Sollumz write the game's binary files directly. What each tool is for is compared in CodeWalker vs Sollumz.

The tools are in the sidebar of the 3D viewport (press N), in the tab Sollumz Tools. Properties of the selected thing are in the Properties editor, in panels named Sollumz.

Where	Panel	What you do there
Sollumz Tools	General	Import RAGE Assets and Export RAGE Assets. The View sub-panel shows or hides collisions and switches the LOD level on screen.
Sollumz Tools	Drawables	Create Drawable Objects, Shader Tools, LOD Tools and Bone Tools.
Sollumz Tools	Collisions	Create Bounds and Create Collision Material.
Sollumz Tools	Fragments	Create Fragment Objects, Set Mass, Copy Bone Physics and Vehicle Tools (light IDs, wheel and window previews).
Properties > Object	Sollumz	The Sollumz type of the object and its settings.
Properties > Bone	Sollumz	Bone tag, bone flags and the Fragment Physics switch.
Properties > Data (mesh)	Sollumz LODs	Which mesh is used at each level of detail.
Properties > Material	Sollumz	Shader, textures and shader values.

Every object in a Sollumz scene has a Sollumz type. A vehicle is this tree:

mycar                  Armature, Sollumz type: Fragment (bones = the car's parts)
  mycar.mesh           Empty, Sollumz type: Drawable
    chassis            Mesh, Drawable Model (skinned to the bone "chassis")
    bodyshell          Mesh, Drawable Model
    door_dside_f       Mesh, Drawable Model
    wheel_lf           Mesh, Drawable Model, "Is Wheel Mesh" on
    ...
  mycar.col            Empty, Sollumz type: Bound Composite
    chassis.col        Bound Geometry, follows the bone "chassis"
    wheel_lf.col       Bound Disc, follows the bone "wheel_lf"
    door_dside_f.col   Bound Geometry, follows the bone "door_dside_f"
    ...

Part	Blender object	Sollumz type
The vehicle	Armature	Fragment
Visible model	Empty, child of the armature	Drawable
Each mesh	Mesh, child of the drawable	Drawable Model
Collision	Empty, child of the armature	Bound Composite
Each collision shape	Child of the composite	Bound Geometry, Bound Disc, Bound Box and so on

The root has to be the armature. The game does not find doors, wheels and seats by mesh name. It finds bones, and each bone carries a numeric tag that Sollumz derives from the bone name. That is why bone names have to be exact.

Import the stock vehicle closest to yours with Import RAGE Assets and keep it in the scene while you work. Select the .yft; when the _hi.yft sits next to it, Sollumz merges the two on import. The stock vehicle is the specification: which bones exist, how they are named, which collision shapes it uses, what each part weighs and which shaders it has.

Two habits save time here:

• Rename the reference objects first, for example with a ref_ prefix. Blender keeps object names unique, so if the reference still owns the name chassis, your own mesh silently becomes chassis.001.
• Copy the reference armature instead of creating bones by hand. The copy keeps bone tags, bone flags and physics settings. Then move the bones to fit your model and delete the ones you do not use.

A car uses a fixed vocabulary of bone names. These are the common ones:

Bone	Part
chassis	Root of the vehicle.
bodyshell	Body panels that never move.
wheel_lf, wheel_rf, wheel_lr, wheel_rr	Wheels: left front, right front, left rear, right rear.
door_dside_f, door_pside_f, door_dside_r, door_pside_r	Doors, driver side and passenger side, front and rear.
bonnet, boot	Hood and trunk lid.
bumper_f, bumper_r	Bumpers, which can fall off.
seat_dside_f, seat_pside_f, seat_dside_r, seat_pside_r	Where each ped sits.
steeringwheel	The steering wheel.
windscreen, window_lf, window_rf	Glass panes.
headlight_l, headlight_r, taillight_l, taillight_r, indicator_lf, brakelight_l, reversinglight_l	Where each light shines from.
misc_a, misc_b, ...	Extra moving or detachable parts, such as a wing.

Seats and entry points in vehiclelayouts.meta refer to these same bones. Positions that we measure on the model instead of guessing:

• Doors pivot on the bone, so the bone goes on the hinge line: the front edge of a normal door.
• Bonnet: rear edge. Boot: front edge.
• Steering wheel: the centre of the rim, not the centre of the whole object. With the steering column included, the bounding box centre was 46 cm off on one car we converted.
• Light bones: the middle of the faces that glow.

Each mesh has to follow its bone. Give it a vertex group named exactly like the bone with weight 1 on every vertex, and add an armature modifier. Bone Tools > Add Armature Modifier does the second part for the selected objects. To see or change a bone tag, select the bone and open Properties > Bone > Sollumz.

Sollumz materials are game shaders. Create one in Drawables > Shader Tools with Create Shader Material, or turn an existing Blender material into the selected shader with the convert buttons in the same panel. These are the vehicle shaders we use and what for:

Surface	Shader	Note
Body paint that players can respray	vehicle_paint1 and the other vehicle_paint shaders	The paint layer (primary, secondary, pearlescent, wheel, interior) is set in the material's Fragment (Vehicle Paint) panel.
Fixed colour or textured parts: livery, plastics, metal, interior	vehicle_mesh	Uses the diffuse texture as it is.
Tyres and rims	vehicle_tire	Use it for the whole wheel. Parts of a wheel on vehicle_mesh did not render in game in our tests.
Glass	vehicle_vehglass, vehicle_vehglass_inner	Outer and inner face of each pane.
Lamp lenses, neon	vehicle_lightsemissive	Glows when the matching light is on.
Stickers, nets, badges with transparency	vehicle_decal

Two things that are not visible in Blender decide how the car looks in game:

• Vertex colour. On the mesh shaders the red channel of the first colour attribute multiplies the texture. A mesh with black vertex colour is black in game however good its texture is. Fill it with a colour whose red is 255.
• Light ID. On vehicle_lightsemissive the alpha channel of the vertex colour says which light the faces belong to. Set it in Fragments > Vehicle Tools > Light IDs: go to Edit Mode with face selection, select the faces, pick the light and press Set Light ID.

Light ID	Light
0	Always on
1, 2	Left and right headlight
3, 4	Left and right taillight
5, 6, 7, 8	Indicators: front left, front right, rear left, rear right
9, 10, 11	Brake lights: left, right, centre
12, 13	Reversing lights: left and right
14 to 17	Extra lights

For textures, keep the diffuse from your model and take specular, normal and dirt maps from the game's shared vehicle textures when you can. Sizes and formats are in optimising a FiveM vehicle.

The game draws one wheel model on every wheel. Model the wheel once as wheel_lf, centred on its bone, and tick Is Wheel Mesh in Properties > Object > Sollumz. Without that switch the wheel is exported as part of the body: the car shows up with one wheel floating in place and none on the other hubs. Vehicle Tools > Preview Wheel Instances shows the wheel on all four positions inside Blender.

Each wheel also needs its own collision disc so the car has something to roll on. That is covered in vehicle collision in Sollumz.

Every Drawable Model can hold five meshes: Very High, High, Medium, Low and Very Low. They are listed in Properties > Data > Sollumz LODs. On export, Sollumz writes the Very High meshes to <name>_hi.yft and the other four to <name>.yft. There is nothing to split by hand: if any model has a Very High mesh, the _hi file is created.

How to generate the lower levels, and what to put in lodDistances, is in optimising a FiveM vehicle.

Select the fragment (the armature) and press Export RAGE Assets in Sollumz Tools > General. The settings that matter for a vehicle:

Setting	Value	Why
Target Formats	Native	Writes binary files the game loads directly. CW XML writes CodeWalker XML, a readable text version that is useful for checking the result.
Target Game Versions	Gen8	Gen8 is GTA V Legacy and Gen9 is GTA V Enhanced. With both on, files go to gen8/ and gen9/ subfolders.
Limit to Selected	On	Exports only what is selected and visible.
Texture Dictionaries	On, Include: Selected	Writes the .ytd. With All you also get the dictionary of the reference vehicle.

The result is mycar.yft, mycar_hi.yft and mycar.ytd. A hidden object cannot be selected, and Sollumz hides meshes when you switch LOD level, so if nothing is written or the log says "No Sollumz objects selected for export!", unhide the vehicle and select it again. After every export, look at the file time on disk before testing.

• Every bone with Fragment Physics on has a collision. If one does not, the export warns: "Bone has physics enabled, but no associated collision!".
• No mesh has black vertex colour.
• Every texture a material uses is in the .ytd, or comes from the game's shared vehicle textures on purpose.
• The wheel mesh has Is Wheel Mesh on.
• Scale is applied: no scale left on the armature.
• Each file is within the server's size check. See the oversized asset warning.

Put the three files in the stream folder of a resource. The quickest first test is to name them after a stock vehicle, for example sultan.yft, sultan_hi.yft and sultan.ytd: the game then draws your model wherever a Sultan spawns, with the Sultan's handling and seats, and you need no meta file yet.

When the model looks right, give it its own name and metas so it loads next to the stock cars. That part is in how to add an add-on vehicle to a FiveM server.