With Dash's Content Browser, you can tag all your assets, making them easy to find and also create a Centralized Asset Browser. Meaning that you can access all your UE5 assets from any Unreal project.
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Tip: If you want more information about the Dash Content Browser, you can check this page for full details: Content Browser Basics
Why would you use Dash to browse your local content, when UE's content browser is right there? Because, Dash makes it more convenient to sift through your content by using AI to tag all your content, making it easy to sift through, no matter how good or bad the naming convention might be.
Tagging your assets is super easy, and below you will learn how:
Open the Content Browser from the Content icon in the Dash bar. Then use the Library dropdown in the top right of the Content Browser to switch to the Current Project tab. This will bring you here where you will see a folder hierarchy on the left which corresponds to the one you have in the UE content browser, and the count on each is the number of static meshes available in the folders. To be clear, the assets you can see here are the assets in your Content folder, i.e. the assets you have added to this current project.
If you click on a folder, a button will show up suggesting you to compute the assets in the folder, and use AI to tag them. Running a computing process means you will get access to these assets directly through the Dash Content Browser. You can select any of the folders, including the main Content folder, but if you have a lot of assets it is better to compute one sub-folder at a time.
We only compute static meshes by default, though you can also compute materials. To do it, locate the specific folder that contains your materials in Dash's Content Browser folder view, then right-click on the folder, and select Include Materials. An icon will show up to indicate that the folder will now have its materials computed
You can enable or disable AI tagging by using the checkmark on the compute button. This is relevant since the tagging process is financially costly for us which means there is a monthly limit on the Dash licenses, controlling how many assets one can AI tag per month. The good thing is though, that even if you compute your asset folders with AI Tags or not, you are on your way to setting up your Centralized Asset Browser experience in Unreal Engine.
Once you have computed some assets in Project 1 (we call it Project 1 as an example), you will automatically be able to browse, search, and use these assets in all your other Unreal Projects without first importing them to these projects.
In Project 2 (or any other project), open the Content Browser and in the Library Dropdown in the top right, you will now see Project 1. Opening this tab will show you all the assets you computed in Project 1. And now you can browse, search, and use these assets however you like! Once you use an asset in Project 2, we handle the import process from Project 1 to Project 2 in the backend for you.
If you don't see the tab for Project 1 or any other UE project where you have computed assets, you need to link the paths. --> In the Current Project tab within the Content Browser, open the menu on the right and select Manage External Library. You'll be shown the preferences window, and in there you can add the path of Project 1, or any other UE projects where you have computed assets.
UE5 is forward compatible, but not backward. In the case of browsing external content, this means that if your current project is in UE5.3, you'll be able to access the content of all versions below it, but not above it.
If you add all your assets to one single UE project, perhaps named Asset_Library_Project and then compute all the assets in this project. You have just created a Centralized Asset Experience for yourself. As now in any other UE projects, you no longer need to import a bunch of asset folders and bloat your projects. You only have to search among all your assets through the Dash Content Browser and use your preferred ones while we handle the import process in the backend for just these actually used assets.
If you want even more structure, another way of going about this is creating separate UE projects based on asset themes. For example forest_assets_project, city_assets_project and indoor_assets_project. Then you can add the relevant assets to each project, and compute the assets in each. Now in your other Unreal projects, you will instead have separate tabs in Dash's Content Browser, perhaps making it feel more organized as you can choose to only search or browse through the forest assets without seeing the city assets. If the amount of tabs becomes too many, you can open the Dash preferences and uncheck certain projects, to not have these assets visible in the Content Browser.
If you are a studio that wants a Shared Centralized Asset Browser/Experience, you only need to make sure the UE asset projects where you have computed the assets are shared among your team and also that the caches where we store the compute/tagging information are shared among your team. In the Dash preferences you can choose your custom cache path, just change the "Current Project Path" to any local or cloud location.
