# 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** |

:::tip{title="Judging a material"}
**Shift** + middle drag spins the garment while the lighting stays put. Orbiting moves the camera *and* your view of the highlights with it, which hides how a surface actually behaves. Spinning the model is how you tell satin from plastic.
:::

## 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.

:::note{title="If you are looking for Brightness and Ambient fill"}
They are gone, along with GTA/PBR, roughness, metallic and HDR. Each of them existed to work around a rig that lit a garment identically at midnight and at noon. One honest time-of-day control replaces all of them — if a garment looks too dark, move the hour rather than lifting an exposure number.
:::

### 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](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/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](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/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](/cloth-tool/information-and-errors/common-errors).

## Related pages

- [Building](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/building) — When your project is ready, hit Build and choose the FiveM target.
- [Importing](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/importing) — Select an item and click Import .ydd / .ytd (or right‑click an item → import).
- [Interface](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/interface) — The main window is split into three panels.
- [Items and Textures](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/items-and-textures) — An item is one garment or prop.
- [Texture Optimization](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/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](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool/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](/cloth-tool/about-the-tool) — back to the section overview