# How to make a custom FiveM-compatible weapon skin > How to make a FiveM-compatible weapon skin: why UV layout decides where artwork lands, decal versus full wrap, and the two ways to produce one. Try it free. Source: https://fam-tools.com/guides/make-a-fivem-weapon-skin · FAM Tools · published 2026-10-25 · updated 2026-10-25 · about 8 min **Short answer.** How to make a FiveM-compatible weapon skin: why UV layout decides where artwork lands, decal versus full wrap, and the two ways to produce one. Try it free. A weapon skin is a repainted texture dictionary. The hard part is not the painting - it is knowing which part of a flat texture ends up on the side of the gun the player actually looks at, because a logo placed in the wrong region lands on the inside of the magazine and is never seen. ## Why you cannot just paint on the texture A weapon texture is not a picture of a weapon. It is an atlas: the model's surfaces are unwrapped and packed into one image wherever they fit, often rotated and mirrored. The receiver, the barrel, the grip and the internals can be scattered across the sheet in no obvious order. So the real question for any skin is: which rectangle of this image corresponds to the flat outer face of the gun? Answer that and placement is easy. Guess it, and you spend an evening exporting and re-checking. ## A decal, sticker or logo One graphic on one visible panel. It keeps the weapon's original wear and shading, so it looks native. Best for server logos, gang emblems and tournament branding. Use a PNG with real transparency - a white box around a logo is instantly obvious in game. ## A full wrap or camo A pattern tiled across the whole weapon. Use a seamless tile or the repeat will show as visible seams. Blend it rather than replacing the texture outright, so the original scratches, panel lines and specular detail still read through - a flat colour wrap makes an expensive model look like plastic. > **Worth knowing** — Many models map the left and right side of the receiver to the same texture area to save memory. On those, any text you place reads correctly on one side and mirrored on the other. There is no fix short of re-UVing the model, so either accept it or choose a symmetrical design. ## Doing it by hand 1. Open the weapon's .ytd in CodeWalker and export the diffuse texture. 2. Open the .ydr in a model viewer alongside it, so you can see which UV island sits where. 3. Paint on a new layer in your editor, never on the original pixels, so you can reposition without losing the base. 4. Export at the original dimensions and compression, with mipmaps regenerated. 5. Import back over the original texture entry, keeping its name. 6. Load it in game and check both sides, plus first-person view, before calling it done. Budget a couple of hours for your first one. Most of that is the back-and-forth of discovering where your artwork actually landed. ## Doing it in the browser Our studio removes the guesswork by analysing the mesh directly: it loads the model, works out which triangles face the flat side of the weapon, rasterises them back into texture space and finds the largest calm rectangle that matches your image's aspect ratio. You drop in a PNG and it lands on a panel the player will actually see. From there you can drag it, rotate it, stack layers, switch between sticker and full-wrap modes and watch the result on the spinning 3D model in real time. Export gives you a finished resource with the dictionary rebuilt correctly. Your first weapon is free, so the fastest way to understand any of the above is to try it on one. ## Questions ### What image should I upload for a logo? A PNG with a genuinely transparent background, square if possible, and at least 512x512. Square images place most predictably because the placement search matches your aspect ratio against the space available. ### Why does my logo look stretched? The UV island it landed on is not square, so texture space is compressed in one direction. Either move it to a different panel or pre-distort the artwork to compensate. ### Can I sell weapons I skinned? That depends entirely on the licence of the base model, not on the skin. Reskinning someone else's model does not grant you the right to redistribute it. ### Will a skin affect weapon stats? No. A skin only changes the texture dictionary. Damage, range, clip size and recoil live in weapons.meta and are untouched. ## Related - https://fam-tools.com/guides/ytd-texture-dictionary - https://fam-tools.com/guides/fivem-weapon-item-images - https://fam-tools.com/guides/add-custom-weapons-to-fivem - https://fam-tools.com/guides/openiv-codewalker-sollumz