Dash 1.7.0

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TL;DR: Dash 1.7.0 is a significant update designed to enhance productivity with new tools and features. This release includes a new vines creation tool, improved property references, and a faster, more accurate AI tagging solution. Additionally, it introduces simplified workflows such as atlas texture conversion from megascans.se.

• New vines creation tool for generating vines on surfaces with ease.

• Enhanced property references for better asset management.

• Upgraded AI tagging solution for quicker and more accurate tagging.

• Drag & drop atlas texture conversion from megascans.se.

• Improved workflow and productivity tools.

This is a fairly major release and introduces new tools such as the vines tool, and features like property references and many other to increase your productivity tenfold. Additionally, we’ve revamped our AI tagging solution to give you more accurate tags, at a much faster rate.

Let’s dig into all that!

Vines Creation Tool

You’ve been asking for it, and here it is! The workflow is simple: select a surface you want the vines to grow on, and an actor to serve as your origin, and watch the magic happen.

Want something even simpler? Download Atlases from the megascans.se website, and drag & drop them from the Dash Content Browser onto an object, which will automatically convert the atlas texture to mesh cards, then scatter them nice and dandy like leaves on branches.

Pure. Magic.

AI Tagging with GPT4

Our current tagging solution has been used to tag over 500,000 assets, which is a great feat! We’ve been looking for ways to improve it, but like most open source models, found that it’s fairly limited in quality and speed, especially when you don’t want to download tens of GBs on the user’s computer.

And so we bit the bullet and started using GPT4o as our main asset tagging solution. It’s fast, incredibly fast. And the quality is state of the art. We’re on an enterprise plan, which guarantees you that none of your data ever gets trained on by OpenAI, and we of course don’t use any of your data for training either.

We’re introducing a cap on how many assets you can tag per month, and it’s currently sitting at 800/month for students, 2000 for professionals, and 10000/month for studios. We’ll be adjusting the cap organically in the coming weeks until we feel that it hits the right spot.

Reference Properties

Sometimes, you’ll have an environment full of Dash tools: some grass scattered with the tool Surface Scatter, a road made with Road Tool, wooden posts along the road with Path Scatter, decals to blend the road and the ground with Decal Scatter, etc…

The new Reference system will help you control properties from all your tools in a unified way.

Got a specific width for your path? Just create a reference property for that, and use it to drive the entire environment.

References replaces our old variables system, which was useful but too limited.

IES Profiles Library

IES are small files that describe how light is distributed from a lamp. Luckily for us, there are websites like ieslibrary.com that share almost every IES profile you can think of, and lucky for you, all of this is now accessible right inside Dash!

Image to Grading

Got an image? Like its grading? Just drag & drop it onto the Dash bar, and we’ll give you its grading. As simple as it gets. Works with local images and online URLs!

Fog Cards 2.0

We’ve revamped our fog cards from the ground up, and they now feature much better lighting interaction, animation, density control, and everything else you need to give your scene some character. These are truly the best fog cards you’ve ever tried.

We’ll be shipping rain, snow, dust, wind and many other atmospheric effects in the near future, stay tuned!

Blend Material

You’re gonna love this new blend material: Select 3 surfaces in the Dash Content Browser, drag and drop them onto a surface, and with CTRL held, click “Create Blend Material”. This will create a new blend material that uses height map, vertex color (for non-Nanite meshes) and noise as its blending options.

Your selected surfaces will be used in their order to drive the blend layers order, so keep that in mind!

You also have full control over every single layer, from basic color controls to excluding certain texture maps (like say roughness) from affecting the layer stack, etc…

You can think of this as a lite version of Quixel Mixer: A simple but effective way of creating surfaces for your grounds with ease. We’re planning to make them available for landscapes, give you the ability to bake down the whole material into regular PBR textures, and (high prio!) support for non-Megascans surface blending.

Keep in mind, vertex painting is not available when your mesh uses Nanite, but you can still blend based on height, as we do almost exclusively in the video below.

Landscape Layer Masking

This has been one of your most requested feature, and it’s here: You can now specify the name of a landscape paint layer in Surface Scatter, and it’ll be used as a mask.

Instance Color Variation

We’ve shipped this feature in Dash 1.6, and cleaned up the workflow in this update to make it easier to work with. Instance color variation is crucial in breaking up repetition when scattering large quantities of objects. Give it a try!

Volume Scatter

This new tool allows you to fill any object with other objects. You can leverage it with the physics tool, or to create floating elements like birds in the sky, or asteroids around a planet, floating objects, etc…

In the video below, we created a blobby mesh as our bird flock volume, then used the tool to fill it with birds! :D

Multi Asset Tagging

You can already manually add/remove tags from an asset, and with Dash 1.7, that same operation can be used on multiple assets at once. Just hit SHIFT+Click to multi select assets, right click on them, and select Batch Tag Edit. Add/remove words as you see fit, hit save, and voilà.

This is especially useful as a way of marking assets with keywords depending on the project/level.

That makes them easy to find, and combined with AI tagging, even easier to sift through. For example, a global tag on a project might be PROJ1. And so when you’re looking for mossy rocks, you might type “proj1 rocks mossy”.

Curve Masking Improvements

When scattering on large areas, you can use curves to ensure that scattered objects are kept inside the curve. With this update, we have 10x’ed the performance of that operation.

Border Masking

We’ve had a few tricks to do border masking so far, and this release refactored the whole workflow into a cohesive, fast and reliable solution. If you scatter on a mesh that has borders, it will just work. No bugs, no slowdowns. Have fun!

Mesh Border to Curves

The name says it all: Select a mesh, run this action, and you’ll get a spline/curve for every border on the input meshes. This is really useful for archviz, but has uses in all industries. Give it a try!

Tool Presets Improvements

Every tool can have its properties saved as a preset, making it easy to reuse your favorite presets, or share them with others! With this update we’ve made their saving structure clearer, and you can now rename & delete presets without breaking a sweat.

Presets will continue to grow in the next version, as they’re slated to become a central part of Dash. Stay tuned on that!

Asset Export as ZIP

Sharing specific content from a UE project, whether it’s a material, a texture or a whole scene, is an annoying process. We’ve made this action to make it as simple as it can be: select your assets in the UE content browser, type “asset export” in the Dash prompt bar, hit Enter, and you’ll be able to save your asset and all its dependencies in a ZIP file.

No need to create an empty project in which to migrate it to. Just zip it, and send it wherever you want.

Save File Improvements

Those of you working in studio settings have been requesting this for a while, and we’ve delivered: Dash doesn’t save its data in a separate JSON file anymore. Instead, everything you do on one level, gets saved inside that level. This removes any need for syncing the JSON file between computers.

Not only that, everything is still backward compatible, so you don’t have to worry about this change breaking previous work. Lastly, the data is just a simple JSON structure that’s easy to read.

Towards Dash 2.0

Dash is slowly becoming an ecosystem of tools for all world building tasks: From asset placement to material authoring, camera setup, physics-based placement, vines, channel packing, atmospherics and everything else.

The overarching philosophy behind everything we do is clearer by the day: We don’t want a world of instant gratification through AI prompting, nor are we content with the status quo of traditional tools and workflows that can’t keep up with the times. Dash ought to sit right in the middle, and help you create art you can feel proud of.

We’ll share more on Dash 2.0 in the near future, so stay tuned for more, and feel free to join our Discord, where an initial beta will kick off this summer!

...and more!

• Path Scatter: There’s now a Sampling setting that helps with curve sampling accuracy.

• Path Scatter: Position Overrides are now available, making it easy to break up your paths!

• UI Scaling bugs: We’ve fixed a couple of issues here, with some more left!

• Dash Search: We’ve made the search in the Dash bar faster & more intuitive.

• Content Browser: All available libraries (Custom, Megascans, Polyhaven, etc…) are now much more intuitive to navigate, through a clear dropdown.

• Surface Scatter: Rotation Overrides are a new set of XYZ properties that help you quickly transform your scatter objects.

• Curve Draw: You can now edit existing curve actors! Just select them, and type “draw curve” in the Dash bar, then hit Enter, and the curve is now editable.

• Curve Draw: When in draw mode, press the M hotkey to switch between curve draw modes.

• Curve Draw: Resampling now retains your settings between drawing passes.

• All tools that generate geometry will now have the pivot centered at the bottom of the geometry.

• Content Library: We improved the speed of loading and searching inside the Dash library and searching on thousands of assets will be an instant result

• …and a lot more!