What is OpenIV?

• Unpacking add-on mods: opening a dlc.rpf, including the archives nested inside it, and extracting the files to a normal folder.
• Inspecting models: previewing a .yft to check that it opens, what it looks like and which textures it expects.
• Editing textures: opening a .ytd, seeing the resolution, format and mip count of each texture, and exporting or replacing individual images.
• Reading meta files: viewing and editing vehicles.meta, handling.meta and the other XML files in the built-in text editor.
• Borrowing base game data: finding a stock vehicle's handling or layout entry to use as a starting point for an add-on.

1. Start OpenIV and choose GTA V for Windows. It asks for the game folder the first time.
2. Open the mod's dlc.rpf. OpenIV can open archives stored anywhere on disk, not only those inside the game folder.
3. Browse to the data folder, select the .meta files, right-click and extract them.
4. Double-click the nested vehicles archive to step into it, select every .yft and .ytd and extract them.
5. Repeat for the mods archive if the car has tuning parts.
6. Place models and textures in the stream folder of a new resource and the metas in a data folder. The manifest that completes the resource is written out in the dlc.rpf conversion guide.

Extracting never changes the archive. Saving changes back into an archive requires switching on Edit mode first, which is OpenIV's guard against accidental edits to game files.

Double-clicking a .ytd opens the texture editor. Each row is one texture with its size and format, which makes it easy to spot the 4096 px or uncompressed images that push a file past FiveM's 16 MiB warning. The usual manual routine is to export the large texture, resize it in an image editor, import it again and save.

When replacing a texture, keep its name unchanged, keep power-of-two dimensions, choose a compressed format (DXT1 or DXT5) and make sure mipmaps are generated. Doing this for dozens of cars is slow, which is the gap the Texture Optimizer and Glory Optimizer fill.

• OpenIV is a Windows desktop program. There is no version for Linux servers, so files are prepared on a PC and uploaded. Converting cars to FiveM without OpenIV covers what is possible from a browser instead.
• It edits archives and textures, not meshes. Changing the shape of a model needs a 3D tool such as ZModeler or Blender with Sollumz.
• It does not build FiveM resources. The manifest, data_file lines and folder layout are still written by hand or generated. Desktop converters automate that step; rpf2fivem compared with online converters describes one.
• Its single-player features (the mods folder and the ASI plugin) are irrelevant to FiveM, which does not read a single-player mods folder.

For maps and interiors the community tool is CodeWalker, which also has an RPF explorer; for vehicles OpenIV remains the common choice.