Custom Character Creator

The Custom Character Creator is where a player builds one of the two “freemode” characters, the same kind GTA Online makes you build the first time you play. You pick two parents, mix their faces, push the sliders around, then add hair, makeup, tattoos and clothes.

It sits under Player Related Options, Custom Character Creator, right below Player Appearance. The two do different jobs: Player Appearance changes the clothes on whatever ped you are wearing, the Custom Character Creator makes the person underneath.

For players

Making one

Pick Create Male Character or Create Female Character. You cannot do this from inside a vehicle, because the creator freezes you in place and points a camera at you.

Page	What is on it
Randomize Character	Rolls a whole new person, face and clothes included
Character Inheritance	The two parents, and how much of each one shows
Character Appearance	Hair, beard, eyebrows, makeup and the rest of the skin layers
Character Face Shape Options	Twenty sliders for the shape of the face itself
Character Tattoo Options	Tattoos and badges, grouped by where they go
Character Clothes	What the character is wearing
Character Props	Hats, glasses, earrings, watches and bracelets
Clothing Collections	The same clothes, grouped by the pack they came from
Facial Expression	The mood the face rests in
Character Category	Which group this one is saved into

Backing out is blocked on purpose. Save the character, or use Exit Without Saving, which asks you to press it twice.

Moving the camera

What you want	Keyboard and mouse	Controller
Look from another angle	Move the mouse	Right stick
Swing around the character	A and D	Left stick left and right
Zoom in and out	W and S	Right and left trigger
Raise and lower the camera	E and Q	Left stick up and down
Put the camera back where it started	C	Right stick click
Turn the whole character around	Space	X on Xbox, square on PlayStation

The camera follows whichever row you are on, so scrolling onto the shoes row shows you the shoes. From there it is yours to move and it stays put while you keep working on the same page. The character looks back at the camera on their own, until you walk far enough round the back that a neck cannot turn any further.

Disable Auto Camera at the top of the creator stops the camera jumping around, so it stays exactly where you left it. N on the keyboard, or the right bumper on a controller, does the same without opening the page. Like every key in vMenu Enhanced it can be rebound, and the choice is remembered between sessions.

Matching the arms to your clothes

A freemode character’s arms are not part of the top you wear. The game keeps them in a slot called Hands / Upper Body, and that slot decides whether you get bare arms, rolled up sleeves, a jacket sleeve or gloves. So picking a leather jacket does not on its own give you leather sleeves.

GTA Online picks the arms for you every time you change clothes in a shop, and the creator now does the same. Change a top, undershirt or pair of trousers and the arms follow. Gloves survive the change too.

Turn off Match Arms To Clothes at the top of the Character Clothes page if you would rather choose them yourself. The setting is remembered between sessions.

Two things worth knowing:

• Changing the Hands / Upper Body row yourself is never overridden. Your choice stays until the next time you change a top.
• The gloves that go with the flapper dress are the one pair that comes off when you change tops.

This only happens inside the creator. Player Appearance stays completely manual.

Saving one you did not make here

If something else on the server dressed you as a freemode character, Save Current Character takes a full copy: the face, the skin layers, the hair, the tattoos and the clothes. vMenu Legacy could not do this.

Outfits and hair styles

A saved character is three separate things. The character is the person: the face, the skin tone, the tattoos, and there is one of those. An outfit is a set of clothes, and a style is a haircut with its beard and makeup. You can save as many outfits and styles as you like against one character, so it can have a work outfit and a going out outfit without being saved twice.

Both live under Saved Characters, pick a character, then Outfits or Hair & Makeup Styles. Wear something you like, pick Save Current As New, and give it a name.

Every character also keeps whatever it is wearing right now, separately from those lists. Editing a character, or putting a saved outfit on, only changes that. A saved outfit is only ever written to when you ask for it by name, with Save Current As New or Replace, so the creator can never quietly rewrite one. You are also free to delete every saved outfit a character has, it carries on wearing what it had on.

Coming back as yourself

Set As Default Character means you turn into that character whenever you respawn, and when you first join. Pick it again to turn it off.

Your saves travel with you

Characters are saved on your own computer, like saved vehicles and peds, and they are included in the transfer code on the Moving Your Data page. Make one before you rely on them.

For server owners

Both files live in resources/vMenu.Enhanced/config/.

Tattoos

config/tattoos.json is the list of every tattoo and badge the creator offers. It ships filled in with every base game tattoo up to 2026, so you only need to open it if you stream in tattoos of your own.

Unlike every other config file, this one is read by the player’s game rather than the server. So a player who is already connected will not see your changes until they reconnect, and everybody who joins downloads it.

{
  "version": 1,
  "tattoos": [
    { "collection": "mytattoos_overlays", "name": "mytattoos_01_M", "zone": "torso", "gender": "male" },
    { "collection": "mytattoos_overlays", "name": "mytattoos_02_A", "zone": "addon", "gender": "both", "label": "Anchor" }
  ]
}

Field	Required	What it means
collection	Yes	The overlay collection the tattoo lives in
name	Yes	The name of the overlay itself
zone	Yes	Which list it shows up in, see below
gender	No	male, female, or anything else for both. Defaults to both
label	No	What to call it on screen. Without one it is numbered, like every base game tattoo

zone is one of hair, head, torso, leftArm, rightArm, leftLeg, rightLeg, badge or addon. The first seven are parts of the body, badge is the badge overlay list, and addon is a list of its own that only appears once you put something in it. addon is the tidy place for your own tattoos, but a body zone works just as well if you prefer.

Note

Two commands help when a tattoo is not showing up. vmenu_character_tattoos lists every decoration on the ped you are wearing and whether the file knows what each one is, and vmenu_character prints the whole character. Both need the debugging convar on.

Ready made outfits

config/clothing-presets.json holds outfits you publish for everybody, such as a set of police uniforms. It ships empty as [].

You do not have to write it by hand. Give somebody the vMenu.Enhanced.Menus.CharacterCreator.PresetsManage permission and they can build an outfit in game, then use Outfit Presets, Server Presets, Save Clothes To Server Presets. vMenu writes the file and sends the new list to everybody already connected, so there is nothing to restart.

To edit it directly:

[
  {
    "name": "Police",
    "description": "Department outfits",
    "presets": [
      {
        "name": "Patrol Officer",
        "description": "Standard patrol",
        "gender": "male",
        "components": [
          { "slot": 11, "collection": "", "localDrawable": 55, "drawable": 55, "texture": 0, "palette": 0 }
        ],
        "props": []
      }
    ]
  }
]

gender matters, because a drawable number means a different piece of clothing on each model. An outfit saved on one is hidden on the other rather than applied wrongly. Leave it out and the outfit shows for both.

Caution

Writing this file needs add_filesystem_permission vMenu.Enhanced write vMenu.Enhanced in your server.cfg, the same line the permissions example file needs. Getting Started covers it.

Outfits that came with the game

The GTA Online Outfits page needs no configuration. It reads the outfits Rockstar shipped with each content pack straight out of the game and groups them by pack. It is read only, and it has its own permission so you can hide it.

Clothes that survive an update

Every outfit vMenu saves records which content pack each piece came from, as well as its number. That matters because the numbers move. Install one new clothing pack and every piece that sorts after it shifts up, so an outfit saved last week comes back as somebody else’s shirt.

Recording the pack means the shirt is found again by name and number within that pack, which does not move. If a pack is genuinely gone from your server, that slot goes back to the model default and vMenu says how many pieces it could not find.

This applies to saved peds too. Saves written by an older vMenu keep working as they did, and pick up the extra information the next time they are saved over.

Permissions

Permission	What it allows
...CharacterCreator.Menu	Seeing the menu at all
...CharacterCreator.Create	Building a new character, and editing a saved one
...CharacterCreator.Save	Saving to their own collection
...CharacterCreator.Spawn	Turning into a saved character
...CharacterCreator.Manage	Renaming, cloning, categorising and deleting
...CharacterCreator.SetDefault	Choosing who to respawn as
...CharacterCreator.Presets	Seeing and wearing your published outfits
...CharacterCreator.PresetsManage	Publishing and removing them, which writes the config file
...CharacterCreator.OnlineOutfits	Seeing and wearing the game’s own preset outfits

All of them start with vMenu.Enhanced.Menus., and ...CharacterCreator.All grants the lot. They are listed in the config/permissions.cfg.example file your server writes on every start.