Dash Bar
Last updated
Last updated
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 😄
This menu contains various options to move, scale, rotate, drop and adjust your object's positions.
Select Nearby: Given some selected objects, this option will select all objects near it. It'll ignore any object that's larger than the biggest object in your selection. Use SHIFT+Click on this option to only keep the nearby objects, and not the originally selected ones.
This action will ignore any objects bigger than the largest in your selection, and only focus on objects close enough. Think grabbing all items on a table, without picking the ceiling.
Select Above: Given a set of selected objects, this will select all objects that are above them. your current selected objects. Use SHIFT+Click on this option to only keep the nearby objects, and not the originally selected ones.
This action will ignore any objects bigger than the largest in your selection, and only focus on objects close enough. Think grabbing all items on a table, without picking the ceiling.
Physics Drop: Given some selected objects, like say some dishes or trash, this options will start a physics simulation and drop them to whatever's below them. The Dash bar will be in the physics mode, and you'll be able to adjust a few properties.
Physics Paint: Select some objects like debris, trash or anything you want to make a pile of, then select this tool, and you'll be able to paint instances of your selection ultra fast. The Dash bar will be in the physics mode, and you'll be able to adjust a few properties.
Project Below: This option will move your selected object towards whatever's below it. Useful for quickly snapping objects on a table, floor, etc...
Random Swap: Select a couple of objects you want to swap, and this feature will pick them at random, and switch their positions.
Center Pivot: This will center the pivot of your selected actors. Keep in mind, it won't change the pivot on the static mesh/asset of an actor, just the actor's pivot itself.
Bottom Pivot: This will move the pivot of your selected actors to its bottom. Keep in mind, it won't change the pivot on the static mesh/asset of an actor, just the actor's pivot itself.
Top Pivot: This will move the pivot of your selected actors to its top. Keep in mind, it won't change the pivot on the static mesh/asset of an actor, just the actor's pivot itself.
In case you're trying to change the pivot for scattering reasons, our scatter tools have pivot overrides and a "sink" feature to help you adjust your object's position at will.
Average Scale: Takes the average scale of all your selected objects, and applies it to all of them, until they roughly have the same bounding box size.
Minimum Scale: Grabs the smallest object in your selection, and conforms the size of all other selected objects to this, until their bounding box is of the same size.
Maximum Scale: Grabs the largest object in your selection, and conforms the size of all other selected objects to this, until their bounding box is of the same size.
Random Angles: Randomly spins your selected objects on their Z axis.
Reset Rotations: This is a quick shortcut to reset the rotation of your selected objects.
Reset Scale: This is a quick shortcut to reset the scale of your selected objects.
That's it! If you have some feature suggestions for more quick operations along these lines, please feel free to bring it up on our Discord!
This menu contains all the major scattering features in Dash. One thing to keep in mind is that these tools work with actors, not assets. If you want to scatter a rock or a decal, first put them in your scene, then scatter them. You can't scatter directly from the UE content browser, yet. There's a few more that you can find by right-clicking on the Dash logo to expand the tools list, but the most important ones are here:
Surface Scatter: Got a ground you want to scatter objects on? This is your tool. Surface Scatter is incredibly powerful, and can be used to create entire forests, or moss, or garbage near bins, or debris near destroyed building, etc... We've got plenty of video on our YouTube channel highlighting its use.
Path Scatter: Want to scatter some objects along the points of a curve/spline? This tool has everything you need, and then some. You can use it for wooden posts along a path, lamp posts on a road, hanging lights, etc... Its "Parallel Width" feature allows you to scatter on both sides of a curve, which is very practical for roads, paths, etc...
Decal Scatter: Select a few decals in your scene, pass them to this tool, give it a surface, and it'll scatter them all around. Features like scaling, depth control, random spin and surface alignment make this tool extremely useful for urban environments.
Volume Scatter: This tool allows you to scatter objects inside other objects. For example, you could fill a cube with some objects, or create a blobby mesh and scatter birds in it, then move it up in the sky and now you've got birds in the sky.
Grid Scatter: This is a powerful tool to quickly scatter objects in a grid pattern. Its jittering features help you break up obvious repetition fairly quickly.
Radial Scatter: Arguably the most powerful radial scattering tool in UE, you can use this tool to create radial object layouts, or capsule layouts, etc... With its concentric and "every nth" logic, this can help you do simple stuff to entire stadium chair/crowd setups.
This menu is filled to the brim with some of the most useful features in Dash, from terrain creation to mesh & spline primitives, curve tools, camera, water, etc... For all things primitives, be it curves or meshes, they're spawned right in front of you when you click on them
quicklyCreate Terrain Mesh: Creates a mesh-based terrain with various features to deform it with noise, curve its borders, adjust its subdivision level, UV scale, etc...
Create Water: Create a plane with a simple water material.
Create Camera: Creates a Dash camera, which is a custom UE camera built to give you a quick and easy cinematic look. With a wide range of color grading & aspect presets, lens distortion and much more, this camera is perfect for some quick shots.
Create Landscape: This creates a native UE landscape, and also has noise & edge deformation features like the Terrain Mesh tool.
Spawn Character: Spawns a simple 3D character, which is useful for keeping track of your environment's scale, or just as a blockout thing before you swap it with your final character.
Spawn Dash Box: Spawns a cute little box with the Dash logo on it :)
Create Alpha Cards: If you've got an alpha/atlas/opacity texture of assets like leaves, debris and other flat 3D objects, this tool allows you to convert that texture to actual meshes, with orientation and pivot options just a click away. A common use case is using it on leaves, then enabling Nanite on them, and scattering them. Keep in mind: In case you're using Megascans' atlas textures, we've got a quick guide on that.
Draw Curves: Instead of drawing curves/splines by placing points one by one, this interactive tool gives you the ability to just draw curves on your viewport. The Dash bar will switch to the draw curve context, from which you can adjust your curves' point density, smoothing and offsetting. You can even switch the draw mode to "End Points", which allows you to draw a curve between your mouse press point, and mouse release point. Switching to this mode also shows you a gravity property, which makes it quick to realistic add some sagging to your curve.
Draw Vines: This is a simple way of drawing curves in your scene, which then automatically spawns vines alongside them. Once you're done, the vines tool will open up, and allow you to further tweak your newly created vines.
Create Vines: This tools makes it easy to create vines: Give it some surfaces you want to have vines grow on, and some origins, like an empty actor or even a curve, and they'll be used as the source of the vines from which all growth happens.
Create Roads: This is a powerful road creation tool that can be used for much more than just roads. Besides the usual width/edge sink and whatnot, you have extensive geometry features to subdivide it, adjust the density, smooth it, add noise (which makes it useful for cave walls!) and much, much more.
Create Cables: Feed this tool multiple meshes, and it'll scatter cables on them. There's multiple modes that allow you to scatter cables, or just use the input object positions as your source points, etc...
Create Pipes: Simple, fast and powerful pipe creation tool. Like the cable and road tool, the Parallel width feature set of this tool makes it extremely useful for usages beyond basic pipes.
Create Plane: Creates a plane with fairly high density.
Create Box: Creates a box/cube.
Create Sphere: Creates a sphere.
Create Cylinder: Creates a cylinder.
Create Disc: Creates a disc.
Create Rounded Cylinder: Created a cylinder with rounded borders.
Create Line: Creates a simple spline/curve line.
Create Square: Creates a square curve.
Create Rounded Square: Create a rounded square curve with beveled corners.
Create Circle: Create a circle curve.
Documentation: Clicking on this will open the documentation in your default web browser.
Discord: This will open up your web browser, and invite you to join our Discord, which we really recommend whether you're facing an issue, wanting to share art, or just chatting with artists :)
Tutorials: This is a link to our YouTube channel, which features a bunch of videos covering all kinds of use cases.
Website: A link to the polygonflow.io website.
Then we have the Layout section:
Toggle Scale: This will switch between the three scale modes of the Dash bar, its shortcut is CTRL+E.
Full: This is the default mode, and shows the name of all dropdown menus in the Dash bar.
Minimal: This mode hides all the dropdown names, and sticks to an icons only UI.
Toggle Responsive UI: This will switch between the Full, Minimal and Icon only modes.
Move to Left/Right/Center: You can change where the Dash bar is snapped by default with these options. Those positions are at the top of the viewport, left of the viewport, and right of the viewport
And finally, the "Others" section:
Preferences: This opens up the Dash preferences panel.
Check for Updates: Quick way of seeing if there's a new Dash update.
License Manager: This is where you can activate/deactivate a license, start a trial, etc..
Close Dash: Simple action to close the Dash bar. You can also hit Escape twice in the Dash bar for the same effect.
Randomize Material: Dash ships with a bunch of color swatch materials, each having a unique color. This action will go through your selected objects, and assign one such material to each one of your objects at random. We find it very practical for quickly separating objects by color.
You can press SHIFT+Click on the option to assign one color swatch to all of them.
Combined with the recent feature, you could click on that icon multiple times with CTRL+SHIFT+Click on the recent icon to sift through a couple of swatches that are all applied to your selection, or just SHIFT+Click on the recent icon to quickly assign random swatches to each object.
Create Fog Card: This is a powerful fog card creation tool. It'll spawn a plane that has a fog material on it, and also the fog card tool, which allows you to adjust the density, distance fade, motion speed, etc... You can at any point select one or multiple of these fog cards, then in the Tools Panel, click on the tools list icon , and select "Edit Fog Card" to batch edit all your selected fog cards at once.
Let's go through all the features available in the menu, which is a three dots icon on the left corner of the Das bar:
Icon Only: This one collapses the Dash bar into one single icon . Clicking on this icon will show your favorites and recent commands.
