Do your modded vehicles disappear when you get too far away from them? The whole car, or just a few parts? Here's THE solution.
You won't need Zmodeler 3 for this, just OpenIV and your PC's built-in notepad.
Why does a vehicle disappear? A vehicle is made up of several levels of detail, known as LODs. Each LOD corresponds to a different display distance from the vehicle. The closer you are to the vehicle, the better the quality of the LOD, but the further away you are, the lower the quality. In modded vehicles, we often forget or don't want to put in all the LODs, because Zmodeler is rather long. As a result, when we move away from the car, it loads an "empty" LOD, so nothing is displayed, and the vehicle disappears.
So, to solve the problem where only the high-quality LOD is present and causes the car to disappear at a distance, all we have to do is change the display distance of the different LODs. The default value is 12 for the first LOD, but we're going to change all the others to a value of 500, as shown in the video.
The vehicles.meta file to be edited can be found in various places in the game files. For example, if the vehicle to be patched is an addon, we'll look for it in the addon's dlc.rpf file, then in the data files, or something similar. For Rockstar DLC vehicles, you'll need to go in the same way to the dlc.rpf found in the chosen update (e.g. Robbery), common / data. And finally, for updated vehicles (in the "patchday_" files in the "dlcpacks" folder) AND for in-game vehicles (files in the x64e archive in the game root), go to update / update.rpf / common / data.
Extract the file to your PC, then drag and drop it into a notepad. CTRL + F then type in the name of the vehicle to be modified, then once you've found it, simply search for the part to be modified.