If you are using UV-packing automation tools to ensure you are not wasting any UV space, you might sometimes notice that these tools place your UV islands in unusual rotations to make everything fit into your UV space. In the following screenshot, this is exactly what’s happening:
There are a few options we can choose to fix this issue. The obvious one would be going back to the 3D software of our choice, readjusting the island, and re-importing the mesh. However, this can be a time-consuming process. The second option would be to use a ‘CustomRotator’ node in the ‘Material Graph’ if this were a unique texture applied only to this mesh. However, since this texture is applied to multiple meshes, this is not an option. Thankfully, Epic implemented a new feature in Unreal Engine 5 called ‘Modeling Mode’. If we switch to this mode:
At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see an arrow icon that helps you expand the toolbar. From there, you can select the UV editing tools:
We have a bunch of UV editing-related tools here. I think all of them are pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t be going into details on what each of them does. In my case, I’ll use the ‘Transform UVs’ tool to rotate my texture.
After you activate this tool, you can select the part of the mesh whose UVs you want to edit. Then, rotate or scale your UVs as desired:
