Baking Decals to UV texture maps?

[RyanB]

You mean bake out the neutral/bind pose xyz position coordinates to a UV map?

Yes.

I’m not sure how else I could do a UV placement from a hit on an animated mesh? The neutral pose could be far from pose of the character being hit in action.

That is true. If you want to do hit projections using the actual animation pose, I am not aware of any method that let you do that currently, other than manually evaluating the transform chain and applying all the transforms for bones above in the chain. It would be pretty involved to set that up.