How to Generate vehicles.meta and carvariations.meta for a FiveM Add-on (Tutorial)

When you need this

You have a model (.yft, _hi.yft, .ytd) but no meta files, or the ones that came with the mod are for single-player and reference things FiveM does not have. The generator builds a clean add-on set that the Inspector will pass.

Step 1: Set the spawn name

Open the Vehicles.meta Generator. Type the spawn name exactly as the model file is named, lowercase, no spaces: if the file is bmwm4.yft, the spawn name is bmwm4. With "Auto-fill" ticked the texture name, handling ID and GXT key follow automatically.

Step 2: Fill in the identity

Step 3: Classify the car

Pick the vehicle class (affects AI behaviour and garage sorting), the type (car, bike, boat…), the seat layout (LAYOUT_LOW for supercars, LAYOUT_STANDARD for most, LAYOUT_TRUCK / VAN / BUS as appropriate), an engine sound borrowed from a vanilla car, wheel type, dashboard and plate type. Swankness 5 for exotics, 1 for beaters.

Step 4: Choose flags

Sensible defaults are pre-ticked: sports handling, rich car, actual headlight bones, and the two flags that stop the car from spawning as ambient traffic. Add FLAG_HAS_LIVERY if the model ships liveries, FLAG_IS_ELECTRIC for EVs, FLAG_LAW_ENFORCEMENT for police units.

Step 5: Set colour combos

Each combo is primary, secondary, pearlescent and wheel colour using real GTA colour indices from the palette. Four combos is normal; add up to eight. Leave the mod kit as 0_default_modkit unless you ship a carcols.meta.

Step 6: Download the four files

Use "All 4" to download vehicles.meta, carvariations.meta, vehicle_names.lua and fxmanifest.lua. Arrange them like this and create handling.meta with the Handling Editor:

bmwm4/
├── fxmanifest.lua
├── vehicle_names.lua
├── data/
│   ├── vehicles.meta
│   ├── carvariations.meta
│   └── handling.meta
└── stream/
    ├── bmwm4.yft
    ├── bmwm4_hi.yft
    └── bmwm4.ytd

Step 7: Verify

Zip the folder and run it through the Resource Inspector. A generated set with matching file names should score 100. Then ensure it and spawn bmwm4.