sd-signs

3D signs for FiveM. Type it, colour it, place it. Real extruded letter props — not a texture on a plane — in 191 glyphs, ten colours and a matte or neon finish. Up to three rows of text. Size, depth and letter spacing are sliders, every letter can be its own colour, and the whole sign can pulse, cycle, wave or spin. Drag it into place by aim or with a gizmo, saved to the database, admin-gated by default.

Colour is a runtime tint rather than baked geometry, so the whole palette ships in 382 models and about 8 MB — and a ten-colour animation costs no more entities than a static sign.

If sd-signs is useful to you, please ⭐ the repo. Issues and pull requests are always welcome.

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Preview

What it is

A sign builder. You type text into a panel, it appears floating in front of you as you type, you tune it, and then you place it against a wall with a raycast. It stays there, for everyone, across restarts.

The letters are streamed props, one game object per character. That is what makes them read as real signage: they catch light, cast shadows, have a visible depth and a dark return down the sides, and you can walk around them. A 24-character sign is 24 entities, which is why there is a render distance and a length cap.

191 glyphs	A–Z, a–z, 0–9, 67 symbols — punctuation, brackets, currency, arrows, fractions and maths — and 62 accented letters covering German, Nordic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch and Icelandic
10 colours	white, red, orange, amber, yellow, green, cyan, blue, purple, pink
2 finishes	painted (matte) or neon (emissive face that glows at night)
Up to 3 rows	press Enter for a new row; rows stack and centre on each other
Per-letter colour	click any letter in the preview and recolour just that one
Animation	gradient, cycle, wave, chase, pulse, or off
Spin	0–180°/s about the vertical axis
Size	0.2 m to 120 m cap height — a doorway plaque or a letter half the height of the Maze Bank
Per-sign visibility	each sign carries its own render distance, up to ~2 miles
Two placement modes	aim-and-scroll, or drag handles via the optional object_gizmo
Live preview	the real sign, floating in the world, updating as you type
Admin overview	every placed sign, with preview, highlight, teleport, edit and delete

Requirements

• ox_lib
• oxmysql

No framework required. There is no ESX/QB/Qbox bridge and none is needed — the resource resolves players through natives and stores ownership against the licence identifier, so it runs the same on any framework or on none.

Installation

1. Download the latest release zip from Releases and drop sd-signs into your resources folder.

2. ensure sd-signs in your server.cfg, after ox_lib and oxmysql.

3. Grant yourself permission:

   add_ace group.admin sd-signs.build allow

   txAdmin admins already hold group.admin, so they are covered.

4. Restart. The table is created on first start; there is no SQL file to import.

Important

Use a release zip rather than a source download. The NUI is not committed to this repo — the release workflow builds it from web/src and packages it — so a clone of main has no web/build and the panel will not open until you run npm ci && npm run build in web/.

Commands

Command	What it does
/sign	Opens the builder. Tabs between Build and Placed.
/signs	Opens the same panel straight on the placed-signs overview.
/signremove	Deletes the nearest sign within 12 m.

All three are gated behind Config.Ace.

Configuration

Everything lives in configs/config.lua and is commented in place. The parts worth knowing about:

Setting	Default	Notes
Config.Ace	'sd-signs.build'	Set to false to open sign building to everyone. Not recommended — signs are persistent, visible to everyone and cost entity budget.
Config.Limits.maxLength	24	Characters per row. Each one is an entity, so a full three-row sign is up to 72.
Config.Limits.maxRows	3	Rows in one sign. Stored as newlines in the sign's text.
Config.Limits.maxSize	120.0	Cap height in metres at the top of the slider.
Config.Limits.maxPerPlayer	40	Signs one licence may own. nil for unlimited.
Config.RenderDistance	120.0	Default for new signs — each sign then stores its own. Signs placed before that existed fall back to this, so one edit still moves them all.
Config.MaxRenderDistance	3200.0	Top of the per-sign visibility slider. Going higher also needs LOD_DIST raised in export_fivem.py and the .ytyp regenerated, or the game stops drawing letters it is still streaming.
Config.EntityBudget	900	Ceiling on letter entities across every spawned sign. Signs are considered nearest-first, so the farthest go unspawned at the cap.
Config.Animation.letterBudget	600	How many letters get re-tinted per tick. A CPU budget, not an object one — animation costs no extra entities.
Config.Placement.default	'raycast'	'gizmo' to start in gizmo mode. Falls back to raycast when object_gizmo is not running.
Config.Placement.allowSwitch	true	false hides the mode toggle and pins everyone to the default.
Config.Persist	true	false keeps signs in memory only, which is handy while testing.

Server-side limits are enforced independently of the UI. The panel mirrors them for convenience, but every submitted sign is re-clamped in shared/sign.lua before it is stored — the NUI is not a security boundary.

How the props work

191 glyphs in two finishes is 382 models, about 8 MB — and that covers all ten colours, because colour is not in the geometry.

Both finishes use a GTA tint shader (default_tnt.sps, emissive_tnt.sps) carrying a small palette texture with one row per colour. The game picks the row per entity:

SetObjectTextureVariation(entity, 7)   -- blue, on any glyph

So "red A" and "blue A" are the same streamed model, told apart by one integer at spawn time. Baking colour into each model instead would mean 3820 models and ~65 MB.

Three consequences worth knowing:

• Animation is free in entity terms. A sign is one object per letter whether it is static or running a ten-colour wave — animating just writes a new tint index to the same entities. Config.Animation.letterBudget caps how many letters are re-tinted per tick, which is a CPU budget, not an object one.
• Entity count scales with sign density, not with the palette. Config.RenderDistance bounds how far signs spawn and Config.EntityBudget bounds how many letters exist at once; past that ceiling the farthest signs stay unspawned.
• Signs have no collision. GTA scales an entity's visual through its matrix but not its collision mesh, so a scaled-up sign would be visually large and physically letter-sized. A sign you can walk through is the honest option.

Regenerating the props

You do not need Blender to run this resource — the props ship in stream/. The toolchain in assets/blender/ is there if you want to change the font, the palette or the letter depth. It is a four-step pipeline:

Step	Run in	Produces
build_alphabet3d.py	Blender	the 191 glyph meshes and the palette texture
measure_glyphs.py	Blender	glyph_metrics.json — advance widths measured off the real meshes
gen_glyphs_lua.js	node	shared/glyphs.lua
export_fivem.py	Blender (Sollumz)	stream/*.ydr and the .ytyp

The scripts resolve their own location, so a clone needs no path editing -- open the two Blender ones from the Scripting workspace and run them in order. Set A3D_BUILD_DIR if you want the intermediates written somewhere other than assets/blender/build. See assets/blender/README.md for the gotchas — there are several, and most of them fail silently.

Changing the font is supported but not free: it changes every advance width, so all four steps have to be re-run, and the replacement must cover all 191 glyphs and be a static Bold. It is also worth changing the .sa-preview__text font stack in web/src/styles.css (and CAP_PER_EM in web/src/components/SignPreview.tsx) to match, or the panel preview quietly stops agreeing with what actually gets placed.

Credits

The letters are built from Montserrat Bold by Julieta Ulanovsky and contributors, used under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The font is included with the toolchain so the props are reproducible.

License

GPL-3.0.