Dash 1.8.5 (Official)
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Last updated
Was this helpful?
This new update focuses on Fab support in Dash and brings along the way a couple of small and major features that improve your world-building process. From simple incremental rotations that make structures like parked cars easier to create, to more advanced systems like the new data table properties, we've squeezed in a bunch of things ahead of 1.9, and hope you enjoy!
Starting from Dash 1.8.5, when you download assets from the FAB plugin, these assets will now be added to the new FAB view in the Dash Content Browser. This means you can use the FAB assets as easily as you have previously used Megascans assets from the Bridge plugin. Fab doesn't actually copy the assets in your project and instead seems to store some cached version. If you drag & drop the assets from Dash's content browser, this isn't an issue: We load the assets in your project, and everything runs smoothly from there.
This new feature supports Megascans assets and the FBX and GLT format for other free and paid assets inside the FAB plugin. Important to note though, that it is also dependent on how the creator has shipped their assets, so some FBX/GLT assets may not show up in the new FAB view anyhow.
For the Megascans assets, you will have access to our Material Edit and Blend Material tools as you are used to when using Megascans assets from the Bridge Plugin. These tools do not support the other FAB assets right now though.
This integration is in its infancy and will be further refined in 1.9. Long term, our goal is to ensure that world-building remains a fun, fast, and efficient process, regardless of your assets' origins.
Worth pointing out that in order to get Displacement/Tesselation working properly with the Megascans assets from FAB, you need to download the materials in High Quality as they don't ship normal Displacement maps as they did through the Bridge Plugin. Also, if you want to easily use the Megascans Atlases, you still need to grab them from the standalone Bridge Software as they right now aren't available in the FAB plugin.
Dash features an extensive feature set that could greatly benefit from layering as many effects as you want, from stacking as many proximity masks as you want to deforming your terrain with multiple curves and much, much more. This is now possible with Data Tables.
The idea is fairly simple: You click on Edit Table in the tool you're using, then hit the + icon, and start adjusting the properties as you see fit. You can hit that + icon again to create another layer, and continue doing that as many times as you want.
This is an experimental feature, and right now we've made it work for the following features:
Proximity Masking: You can have an unlimited amount of objects used as masks, each having their own distance and other logic.
Landscape Layer Masking: Specify the name of a landscape layer, like "grass" or "cliff", and scale that to 1 or 100 layers if needed.
Noise Mask: Layer multiple noises as your scatter masks, with each entry having its own frequency, scale, etc...
Terrain Curves: Deform your terrain with curves, and use data tables to have different curves with different deformation behavior for each.
In the next release, we'll make this feature available to a lot more systems in Dash. We're also going to further tweak the design of this new data tables panel. With the right ease of use and workflows, this will usher novel workflows in Dash unlike anything we've had before.
Dash comes with a set of intuitive base materials and an extensive blend material that's ideal for world building. We've added an extensive documentation that helps you get the most out of it, from basic setup to UE5-specific configurations like Nanite tessellation, and much more.
As you may know already, Dash has a few procedural mesh creation tools, such as the Terrain Tool, the Road Tool, The Vine Tool, etc. Now we have created a small page here in the documentation that shows off the basics of them!
Our Physics tools are now also finally included in our documentation! So check that new page to learn the basics of them!
In 1.8 we shipped a neat little AI assistant, and the reception around it has been amazing. In this update we've given it the name Sophon, and made it drastically more accurate. It can also suggest actions to directly call tools/features of Dash and is much, much better at linking you to the right documentation sections in case you want to read more. Long-form conversations are also possible, which means you can have one session that discusses a workflow in multiple back-and-forth messages.
Proximity masking in our scatter tools is perhaps the most appreciated feature of our ecosystem, and this new feature makes it easier than ever to create strips of scattered objects, without having to juggle between multiple proximity masks or references. This feature is available in Surface Scatter, Path Scatter, Decal Scatter and Grid Scatter.
Dash has a terrain creation workflow that gives you a mesh, and so far it has been limited to basic noise patterns. With this update, you can now deform your terrain with as many curves as you want, with falloff and tapering features that make it easy to sculpt landscapes with ease. We've also added an experimental height map support, and will expand on it further in 1.9.
As texture repetition is something that many people struggle with we wanted to include an easy way to fix this in Dash and from Dash 1.8.5 it is added to our Material Edit and Blend Material tools. Simply turn on the "Enable BreakUp Tiling" option and see the repetition disappear. If needed you can control the breakup with a few parameters. This is the very first iteration of this feature so bare with us if it has some bugs or limitations.
Being able to create ordered rotations is a crucial part of world building, whether it's constraining cars in a parking lot to specific rotation increments, or simply having a broader scatter setup obey more consistent orientation rules. We introduce in Dash 1.8.5 exactly that: The ability to orient objects towards specific values, and keeping those values in order or randomized. As an example, you could write "0 90" in the property, and we'll pick one of those values and assign it to each scatter object. If sorting is checked, we'll assigning them in an ordered fashion, which is particularly useful when relying on tools like Grid Scatter.
This feature is available in Surface Scatter, Decal Scatter and Grid Scatter. Path Scatter already has an extensive orientation workflow, hence why this feature isn't there.
"Baking" is the term we use for converting instances into individual static meshes, or custom Dash meshes into native UE5 static meshes. In this update, we've simplified the workflow to make it easy to bake the instances or geometry of any tool, all just a click away.
IMPORTANT CHANGE: When installing Dash 1.8.5 and above, as a last step in the installation process, after you have closed the installer, you may see one or more command/console windows, please let them finish their process and let them close by themselves. This is an important step to installing Dash properly.
Surface Scatter Density: The previous Density Mode selection has now been removed and the Density is now always in Global Mode. This means you can and probably need to increase the value above 1. The default max slider value is 5, but if you need a higher value you can just type in your preferred density value.
You can now adjust the Dash Physics collision settings from within the Physics Painter tool, no need to switch to the Physics Drop tool anymore. Just select an object in the Outlier and then set the Collision setting to complex from the Physics Paint menu bar.
Physics Drop, Physics Paint, and Draw Curve is no longer is affected by UE volumes and regions. So now you should not get weird physics or curve results in scenes that have PCG volumes or World Partition regions etc etc.
The bug where Physics Paint controls only worked one time after UE restart is now solved. You can now adjust all the settings in Physics Paint as intended.
The names of the tools in the Dash Tools Panel are now aligned with the name of the tool in the UE outlier to make sure it is easier to keep track of the tools.
In our Blend Material and Edit Material tools you can now control the X Tiling and Y Tiling.
