User Interface
Last updated
Last updated
Dash is an ecosystem that sits on top of Unreal Engine 5. Its user interface aims to be as minimal as possible, showing you only what you need, without hiding anything from you either. When you start Dash, you'll notice there are two main panels: The Dash bar, which is a vertical widget that sits at the top center of your viewport, and the Tools Panel, which is pinned to the right of your viewport, and is where you control your Dash tools.
When you install Dash, its icon will be visible in the Unreal Engine toolbar:
From there, click on it, and the Dash bar will show up.
If clicking on it doesn't show up the Dash bar, check this FAQ guide on how to solve the problem. If that doesn't work, please reach out to us on our Discord or support@polygonflow.io
This widget is your main gateway to Dash, and is jampacked with features:
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 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.
The Dash bar is responsive, meaning scaling the UE viewport will adapt its position and scale too. You can disable this behavior by clicking on the dots menu, then Toggle Responsive UI.
To help you get the most out of Dash, the product ships with an AI assistant you can speak to. It is trained on this documentation, and will do its best to answer your questions, such as:
How do I mask objects by proximity?
Where can I find my license key?
Where do I find physics tools?
I'm unable to scatter more assets after 1.0 when using surface scatter.
etc...
Like most modern AIs, this assistant is not perfect, and occasionally make mistakes. Based on our testing, it seems to be helpful at dealing with most issues users encounter, and we've made sure to include links to our discord, documentation, and support email in the assistant window, just so you know where to reach out in case it's not helpful. We've also exposed a History button that helps you see all the questions you've asked during your UE session; meaning from the moment you started it, 'till the moment you closed it.
The assistant is limited to 25 questions per session, after which we usually recommend you to just read out to us and we'll troubleshoot the issue with you. You could of course just restart UE5 to ask more questions, but at that point, one of our developers would likely be a better assistant 😄
