Getting Started
Last updated
Last updated
Tip: We’ve got a Discord server rich with information and day-to-day problems being solved, so make sure to check it out! Join the Dash Discord Server
Dash is a world building tool for Unreal Engine 5. It aims to solve every problem you face when creating 3d environments, from small things like automatic pivot setting, to scattering, physics-based asset placement, color grading, asset browsing, AI tagging, etc…
I’ll be showing you how to go from zero to hero, so let’s get started!
To start, head over to polygonflow.io to download Dash.
If you’ve never tried it before, you can download the free trial, which is fully-featured, and requires no credit card info.
If you’ve installed it before, click on Download Dash to get the latest version, and check your email for the license key that was previously sent to you.
Before you start the installation process, make sure that you’ve closed all running Unreal Engine software, and also check in your notification tray for the Polygonflow License Server, and make sure you right click → quit it.
During the installation, Dash will automatically detect all UE5 versions you’ve got available. In case it fails to get your UE5 path, help it by putting the engine’s installation path, which typically looks like this:
C:/Program Files/Epic Games/UE_5.X
Once you’ve set the path(s), click on next, and continue with the install.
In case the installation steps above fail, check the instructions in [this page], or directly reach out at support@polygonflow.io, and we’ll ensure that you get things going ASAP.
If you’re using a custom build of Unreal Engine, you can download & compile the source.
If you encounter an issue during the process, please reach out to support@polygonflow.io
Once the installation is done, open Unreal Engine, and you’ll notice the Dash blue icon is now visible on the top left of the UE toolbar. Click on it, and the Dash bar, along with the license manager, will show up. From there, you have the following options:
If this is your first time using Dash, click on that button, then insert your email, and your trial will start right away
Once the license is activated, you can close the License Manager, and this is where the fun begins!
At its core, Dash is a simple bar that’s jampacked with features. We separated them into broad categories that define various tasks in your workflow:
Board: This opens a panel which you can use to organize your reference images, kind of like Miro, Pureref and a few others.
Content: Dash features an amazing content browser, with Megascans & Polyhaven support, custom assets support, an IES library, and the ability to access all your assets from other UE projects!
Place: This shows you a dropdown full of tools that help you with content placement. Features range from pivot setting to physics-based asset placement, and much more.
Scatter: This is where all the cool scatter tools of Dash reside: You can scatter on a surface, along a spline, scatter decals, scatter in a volume, etc…
Create: This is an extensive list of tools that help you create objects, from geometry & curve primitives to cameras, vines, fog cards, etc…
Edit: This is the main properties panel through which all your Dash tools will be edited.
You can make the dash bar smaller by going to the menu icon on the left, then selecting Toggle Scale to swap between full, minimal, and icon only. The shortcut for this is CTRL+E.
The “Find tools” text area is where you can search for tools. For example, we have a really useful tool called “draw curves” which allows you to interactively draw native UE splines. You can open it from the Create menu, or by just typing “draw curves” in the search field, then hitting Enter when you see it suggested. A lot of these tools are often in one of the menus; i.e. Draw Curves is in Create -> Curve Tools. But the search bar has a lot more tools broadly, from simple things like toggling nanite/collision on your selected objects, to more specific tools like the Channel Packer.
And finally, you have the Dash logo, which you can drag around to unsnap the Dash bar from its default position and move it around your screen, or double-click to expand/collapse the list of all tools available in Dash.
We've got an extensive user interface basics that you can follow right here. Since this is a getting-started manual, and you've just got Dash working, let's create something!
We'll scatter some foliage on a plane, then mask it out with a curve, and set up a camera to make it all look good!
First, let's make a simple plane. In the Dash bar, go to Create -> Mesh Primitives -> Create Plane.
Next, let's assign to it a random material color.
I'll do the same thing with a sphere and a cylinder: Create -> Mesh Primitives -> Create Sphere/Cylinder.
As a side note, Unreal Engine's meshes are usually of type Static Mesh. Dash has a special type called Dash Preview Mesh Component. You can convert them to static meshes by selecting the mesh (like a plane) in your scene, then typing To Static Meshes in the Dash bar, then hitting Enter or clicking on the suggested action. This will convert it to a static mesh, and that mesh will now have its asset located at Content/Polygonflow/StaticMeshes.
Additionally, you can also enable Nanite by typing "Enable Nanite" and selecting the suggested action "Actor Enable Nanite". I'll do both for my plane, sphere, and cylinder.
Now that we have a ground, a sphere and a cylinder, let's start using some tools!
First, we'll scatter the sphere on the ground. Go to Scatter -> Surface Scatter. Surface Scatter is an extremely flexible scatter solution that allows you to scatter instances on surfaces, be it meshes, landscapes, procedural meshes, dash meshes, other scatters, etc...
Dash has actions and tools. Actions are like "to static mesh" or "random material"; they're operations that work on your selection or some other context, and usually don't open any panel. Tools are like Surface Scatter: They open a panel, are non-destructive, and stick in your scene even when you restart Unreal Engine, until you delete them for good. When you open Surface Scatter, the Dash Tools Panel will show up and house your Surface Scatter:
Next, we'll draw a curve across our plane, and use it to remove some scattered spheres, which will give us a nice little path. To draw the curve, go to Create -> Curve Tools -> Draw Curve. This will start the curve context mode, and if you drag your mouse around the viewport with the left-mouse button pressed, a curve will be drawn. Additionally, you'll also notice that the Dash bar changes the buttons it shows, and now has options relevant to this specific tool. We can increase the number of points for our curves, smooth them, etc... Keep in mind, this works on even existing splines! Just select them, run the tool, and start smoothing/resampling them.
And now, let's use it to mask our instances!
The Dash Tools Panel is selection-sensitive; meaning if you select the scattered spheres, it'll show the tool attached to it. If you have multiple Dash tools running in your scene, just select their output, which in our case is those instanced spheres, and the panel will show you the tool bound to it.
Scroll down in the properties view until you see a group called Proximity Masking. Expand it, and with your curve selected, add it to the Objects property by clicking on the "+" icon, or double clicking on the property itself.
Surface Scatter is filled with amazing masking features: Landscape layers, raycasting, textures, volumes, sunlight, directional, height, vertex colors, clumping, angle, noise, mesh border, etc... As a brief side note, here's how easy it is to mask by texture: Load up the texture in your project, make sure your mesh has UVs, give it to Surface Scatter, and voilà. PS: You can clear your property from some objects by Right click -> Clear Objects, or Right Click -> Reset to Default.
Back to our scene, the next step is to scatter the cylinder mesh we built earlier along the path, to have some kind of wooden posts. To do this, we'll use another tool called Path Scatter. Go to Scatter -> Path Scatter in the Dash bar, and its properties should show up in the properties panel. Give it the cylinder and the curve, and it'll do its magic.
Surface Scatter will scatter on geometry, while Path Scatter will scatter on curves. If you give to Path Scatter some geometry, it'll try to scatter on its border meshes, but that's about it. This distinction is very important when thinking about what you're working on. lamp posts along a road? Path Scatter. Pebbles along a road? Surface Scatter. etc...
Since our cylinder originally had a uniform size, I did some adjustments in the Scale Properties group by enabling Use Custom Scale, then toying with the min/max on all axes until I get the look I'm after. I then switched the pivot mode to Bottom. Path Scatter and Surface Scatter both have this pivot mode system, which allows you to override the original pivot of the object you're scattering. This can be very useful as you interact with content from asset libraries, all having different pivot standards/qualities.
Next, let's go to the group Path Width, and play with the width value! Let's also open the group Feature Masking, and pass our plane to the Projection Mask property. This ensures that all instances that aren't above the plane don't get spawned.
Look at that! We've got ourselves a cool little scene. Let's do a couple of things to make it all a bit more intuitive. First, both Surface Scatter and Path Scatter rely on the curve to set up a path with a given width. What we want to do is have the property in both tools to be controlled by one value, just so we don't have to jump between them anytime we feel like making the path wider. This is where References come in: You can right-click on a property, like say Distance in Proximity Masking, then create a reference property out of it. Then back in Surface Scatter, you can right-click on the Parallel distance, and assign to it your newly created reference. You can even double click-click on the name of the property to change it!
When you make a numerical (float, integer) property a reference, you'll notice a Weight value appear on the right side of the slider. This weight is unique to each referenced property. So for example, while both the sphere and cylinder instances now share the same path width, you could tweak the weight on the spheres to make a bit of space between them and the cylinders.
In the video above, we're creating a Scene Container property, which can hold objects in our scene. We're giving it our curve, then going to our Path and Surface Scatter tools to make them use that reference instead of the curve directly. This makes it easy to add, replace, edit or do whatever we want with our reference, and see all tools update.
When right-clicking on a property, you'll notice that we have a "Compound" section in the menu that shows up. In short, compounds are custom tools that can be used to group properties from multiple tools. For example, the setup we have so far could be a compound called "Path Creator", and in it, we could expose some reference properties, some regular properties, etc... from any number of tools. You can't create compound properties, you can only add existing properties to them.
In the video below, we start by Right-Click -> Add to New Compound on a property, then we do this again and again on multiple properties, until we've covered all the basics. From then on, we don't need to even touch Path Scatter or Surface Scatter; this is our hub from which all major adjustments are made.
As you accumulate tools, it's important to keep in mind that there are multiple ways of accessing them:
By selecting their result in the scene they will pop up in the Tools Panel.
With just a few primitives and some scatter passes, we can create a really cute scene. In the screenshot below, we've created a few more spheres, scattered some on the ground, some on other scatters, etc... We've also used some of the scattered instances as proximity; you can see the dark green spheres are mostly clustered near the orange spheres, and that's because we used the orange spheres as proximity mask.
Finally, let's make a shot out of this! Go to Create -> Common -> Create Camera. This will create a Dash camera, which is a custom blueprint tailored for cinematic shots. The viewport will automatically switch to this camera, and the tools panel will also show its properties. From there, we can start toying with the color grading presets, shuffle through them, adjust the aspect ratio, bloom, etc... This part is mostly messing around with values and figuring out what works.
I then added a water plane from Create -> Common -> Water Plane, scaled and moved it around a bit, and here's the final result:
I hope you've learned the basics of Dash! We cover the user interface in more detail in the next page, and also have some more extensive use cases in this documentation. Most importantly, we can't recommend you enough to join our Discord community: It's a calm space with artists honing their craft, and our team is there around the clock to help you if needed.
You'll notice that a new clock/time icon has showed up on the left of the search field. That's the history icon, and it lists the last 10 actions you've run from the Dash menus. Clicking on it will show you a dropdown with all the recent tools, and you can even CTRL+Click on it to just run the last action. Here, that means switching between multiple random materials with just one click.
We natively ship an AI assistant in Dash that'll help you with most pressing questions. It's fast, quite good, and our community + support are just one click away if you'd rather speak to a human
Let's get straight to business: Select your plane, then hit the icon on the Surface property, then select the sphere, and do the same for the Scatter property. That's it! You should see your object scattered around, and now, you can just play with the density, scaling, and other values. For our case, I mostly adjust density, min/max scale, and sink.
To remove a reference, simply right-click on a property, then select Remove Reference. To view all references in your scene, from the Tools Panel, open the tools list , and go to Reference Tool. There, you can add, remove and edit your referenced properties.
By switching amongst them from the Tools Panel menu icon
By detaching them as a separate panel from the tools panel with thearrow icon.
By pinning them with the pin icon to ensure that changing selection doesn't switch tools within the Tools Panel.
When you create a new tool, it is pinned by default, as you might for example want to select some instances to pass them to this new tool, but don't want to accidentally start switching tools. Always keep an eye on the pin icon if you notice the panel isn't refreshing.
