Update: in UE5 the UV editing features have moved to the Modeling Mode.

UE4

When you’re in a pinch it might come in handy to generate and unwrap models in Unreal Engine. The first thing you need to do to enable this is enable the Polygon Editing plugin.

Once the plugin is enabled, the editor will need to be restarted. You may need to open the window to generate UVs if it already isn’t open in the Static Mesh Editor.

This tool uses projection to generate the UVs based on the orientation of the projection shape’s surface normal’s. Use whichever one makes the most sense for your mesh. Enable Show Gizmo to view the projection meshes bounds. Fit will automatically adjust the location and size of the projection to fit your mesh. The rotation is on you. Apply will generate the new UVs based on this projection.

UV channel 1 is typically reserved for lightmaps generated by Unreal so you may need to change the channel the generated UVs are saved to.

There are other features of the plugin that I encourage you to explore. Happy unwrapping!

UE5

Now the UV editing tools are in the Modeling Mode.

Now that this is a larger piece of a set of tools, I may write another post about the Modeling Mode in general.