Custom Car (BakkesMod plugin)

Enables custom cars in Rocket League, for free!

Video showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ipqlp0zsMZc

✨ Features

• Use custom 3D models for car bodies and toppers
• Spawn and use any car in the game
  • In freeplay: Hitboxes will be accurate
    • Perfect for test-driving cars before purchasing in RL item shop 👍
  • In online games: All spawned cars will have Octane hitbox
    • This is due to the game's online protections: If you don't own your car, you're forced to use a stock Octane (server-side)

Note

BakkesMod is no longer enabled in online games due to the addition of EAC on April 28, 2026

How to install

Follow the install steps in the latest release

How to INSTALL custom cars

1. Download (or create) a custom car. You can find some here
2. Extract the .zip file. Somewhere inside will be a .json file and a .upk file
3. Click the Open CustomCars folder button in the plugin, and put the .json file in that folder
4. Open the CookedPCConsole folder of your RL installation, and put the .upk file there
   • An example MyCustomCar.upk installed on Epic (the path will be different for Steam users):

     C:\Program Files\Epic Games\rocketleague\TAGame\CookedPCConsole\mods\CustomCars\MyCustomCar.upk
     

   • You can create subfolders to organize your .upk files if you want. As long as the .upk files are somewhere inside the CookedPCConsole folder

How to MAKE custom cars

Here's a video tutorial: https://youtu.be/OlwnVdYyhbk

• Make sure to put the .json files in bakkesmod\data\CustomCar\CustomCars instead of the acplugin folder shown in the video

Building

Build with CMake using a compatible toolchain for your platform:

• Windows: MSVC (via Visual Studio or the Build Tools)
• Linux: clang-cl + lld-link
  • Cross-compiles against a local MSVC/Windows SDK install (obtained via msvc-wine)

Note

Before building with CMake on Windows, the MSVC environment must be initialized. This is normally handled automatically by IDEs or certain editor extensions like CMake Tools, but if you're building from the command line, do one of the following:

• Use an appropriate Windows terminal profile:
  • Developer PowerShell for VS 2022
  • Developer Command Prompt for VS 2022
• Or run this script once per shell session:

  C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvars64.bat
  

1. Initialize submodules

Windows	Linux
./scripts/init-submodules.bat	./scripts/init-submodules.sh

Why a script instead of git submodule update --init --recursive ?

• Avoids downloading 200MB of history for the nlohmann/json library
• Ensures Git can detect updates for the other submodules
• On Linux, applies additional submodule fixes to account for a case-sensitive filesystem and MSVC vs Clang compilation compatibility

2. Build with CMake

Make sure to have CMake and Ninja installed

• For custom builds (e.g. a different generator than Ninja), create a CMakeUserPresets.json and specify it there. more info

Step	Windows	Linux
1. Configure	cmake --preset ninja-release	cmake --preset linux-clang-cl
2. Build	cmake --build --preset Ninja-Release	cmake --build --preset Ninja-Release-Clang

• Other presets available in CMakePresets.json
• Output binaries will be in ./plugins