3D Preview
The centre panel renders the selected garment on a real freemode ped — mp_m_freemode_01 or mp_f_freemode_01, extracted from your own GTA V install — with your .ytd textures applied. It is where you judge fit, texturing, clipping and silhouette before you build anything.
It is not a still image. The ped can play the game's own animations, and a garment that ships cloth data can be simulated.
Moving the camera
| Action | Control |
|---|---|
| Orbit | Left drag |
| Pan | Middle drag, right drag, or Shift + left drag |
| Turn the model under fixed lights | Shift + middle drag |
| Zoom | Mouse wheel |
| Front / Back / Left / Right | Viewport options → Scene → Camera angle |
| Reset camera | Viewport options → Scene → Reset camera |
What the viewport draws
The Show menu in the viewport header switches between five ways of drawing the same mesh.
| Mode | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Shaded | The normal view — textures and lighting. |
| Flat | No texture and no shading. Silhouette and geometry on their own. |
| Normals | Geometry normals as colour. A face lighting up the wrong way here is inverted in game too. |
| UVs | The texture coordinates themselves — red across, green up. |
| Checker | An even grid on the UVs. Squares that come out stretched are stretched in the texture too. |
The same menu holds Wireframe (with its own colour, opacity and a Garment edges only switch that leaves the ped solid), Grid, Floor, Auto-rotate and Only model, which hides the ped and shows the selected garment on its own.
The corner readout gives polygons, vertices and indices for the garment — not for the whole scene.
Viewport options
The gear opens three tabs.
Lighting
Time of day is one slider, and it is the whole lighting rig. It moves the sun, its colour, and the light coming off the sky — every hour has its own sun, sky and exposure, the way the game does it.
Under it, Jump to has six presets: Dawn, Morning, Noon, Golden hour, Dusk and Night.
Shadows makes the ped cast onto itself and onto the floor.
Scene
Backdrop — Studio, Charcoal, White, Greenscreen, Cyclorama, Sunset, Night, Overcast, or Use your own image. The first four are flat colours, which is what a cut-out or a green screen needs. Greenscreen is deliberately kept flat: it must not pick up a horizon or a tint, or it stops being a green screen.
Also here: Camera angle, Reset camera, Rotate speed and LOD, which switches between the model's detail levels.
Body
Hide the base body / Only selected garment strips everything else away.
The ped presets are Default, Dressed and Naked. Below them, Component IDs lets you set each slot by hand to check how your item sits inside a full outfit — -1 means none. Reset components puts them back.
Animation
Enable animation in the viewport plays a clip on the ped. Under Clips you get every clip from the game's own dictionaries, by the name the game knows it by; under Your clips, anything you have made or added yourself. Speed scales playback.
This is what a garment actually has to survive. A coat that reads perfectly in bind pose can fold through the leg the moment the ped walks.
See Animations for making your own clips.
Cloth
A garment that ships a .yld simulates in the viewport, using the constraints and pinned points from the file itself. See Cloth simulation.
When there is no ped
The preview needs your GTA V install to put a body under the garment. If it says so, point the tool at the game in Settings, then Extract base ped — it reads your game files once and caches the result.
A garment with no .ytd draws plain grey. That is the tool telling you it found no texture, not a rendering fault.
Textures not showing
If a garment renders untextured, it is nearly always one of two things: the .ydd has no UV coordinates, so there is nothing for a texture to map onto, or the texture names do not match what the model references.
Switch Show to UVs — if the model shows no coordinates there, that is your answer. See Common Errors.
Related pages
- Building — When your project is ready, hit Build and choose the FiveM target.
- Importing — Select an item and click Import .ydd / .ytd (or right‑click an item → import).
- Interface — The main window is split into three panels.
- Items and Textures — An item is one garment or prop.
- Texture Optimization — Hand-made clothing packs are usually bloated and full of textures the game doesn't like — odd sizes, no mipmaps, wrong compression.
- Team Collaboration — The Cloth Tool has Git‑based collaboration built in, so a team can work on the same pack without emailing folders around — and you get a full, restorable history of every change.
- About the Tool — back to the section overview