Material Authoring
Last updated
Last updated
When working in UE5.4+, make sure that Nanite is enabled on the editor, otherwise displacement workflows won't work.
You can type "actor enable nanite" in the Dash bar, and run the suggested command.
Dash features a wide range of custom materials, from simple PBR setups to complex blend material systems. These materials are built to work around specific content libraries, like Fab, Polyhaven and Megascans. We plan to make them work with any custom object in the future, too.
We provide rich materials for decals, tillable surfaces, 3D meshes, and 3D plants.
To get started, you can click on the Content Icon in the Dash bar. This will bring up a menu of all you favorite Surfaces and Assets downloaded through Quixel Bridge/FAB and Polyhaven. To apply a texture on a surface. We made sure to make it as simple and strait forward as possible. You drag your texture from the content library and drop it on the target surface.
After applying your material on the surface. You can click on the Edit button in the Dash bar to bring up our Tools Panel and in the Tools panel by opening the Active Tools list (top left corner of the Tools Panel) while having your plane selected you can open Material Edit; Where you can control various aspects of your Material, such as: Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Roughness, Normal and so on. In the same Panel we also included some cool advanced effects such as Snow and Rain.
as illustrated in the video below.
This is a powerful material as it provides advanced features such as the ability to blend between 3 textures. The possibility of blending them through vertex painting. And similar to the Base Material this one comes with Rain, Snow, and Puddle effects as well.
The Video below gives you a glimpse of the process of Creating a surface, applying a Blend material and going through some properties.
The layers in our Blend material follow the Same letter of their respective Vertex paint channel. Except for T Weight which is not available through vertex painting.
In the same Tools panel if you scroll down you will find a parameter called Displacement. This allows you to control the displacement of your Base Layer (the first material you selected in the Dash content browser).
Displacement mapping helps you add more depth to your materials. This process typically relies on a texture called displacement map, or height map. The functionality works differently between UE5 versions.
In UE5.1, UE5.2 and UE5.3, displacement is available but doesn't work on meshes with Nanite enabled on them. If you want to use displacement on these older versions, always ensure that Nanite is not enabled on your static meshes. Internally, we use World Position Offset in the node graph to have displacement in those versions. This basically moves the vertices of your mesh, vs generating new, denser geometry on the fly. Important here to use a surface with enough triangles. By using the plane from Create -> Msesh Primitives -> Plane you get a good dense plane.
For that, UE5.4, UE5.5, and above have support for Nanite-friendly displacement, and so do our regular materials, and blend material. For 5.4 and 5.5+, you should enable Tessellation in your project and also have Nanite enabled on your static mesh. Otherwise, displacement won't work.
To enable Tessellation in your project, we've made a shortcut that you can access by typing Tessellation, and then selecting Enable Project Tessellation.
To enable Nanite on your selected static mesh in the level, we've made another shortcut called Actor Enable Nanite. You can always use the UE Content Browser and right-click on an asset, then enable Nanite on the asset itself. But this is slightly faster, and right within Dash, too.
Another thing to keep in mind is that when you create a road or a plane in Dash, those aren't static meshes, but their own custom format. This means they can't have Nanite enabled on them, and thus displacement in 5.4+ won't work either. You can "bake" Dash meshes (like the primitives you find in Creates -> Mesh Primitives) by going into the Dash bar -> Create -> Common -> Bake Meshes option. This will convert your selected mesh into a static mesh.
Here's a video showing what displacement looks like in UE5.1+. As you can see, the quality is quite subpar, because our plane doesn't have enough vertices. You could use the UE5 modeling tools to increase the density, but this won't be as good as Nanite-friendly displacement in 5.4+
Here's what displacement looks like in UE5.4+. The project has nanite enabled, and the mesh is a static mesh with nanite enabled. The quality is as good as it gets.
Snow, Rain and Puddles are some useful and interesting functionalities we added to our Blend materials. Snow is represented by S Weight, Rain by T Weight and Puddles by B Weight.
The videos below show Snow and Rain effects in action.
Snow is controlled by a parameter called S Weight. Which allows you to increase or decrease the amount of Snow on your material.
If you scroll down you will find a property called Snow (S) Layer. This drop-down menu gives you more control on how you would like your snow to behave.
Let's go through some important options here:
S Height Multiplier Allows you to increase the global multiplier of the Snow displacement and the Blend Material displacement.
S Height controls the height of the Snow
S Height Contrast controls how sharp your Snow is. It can also be of negative value. This will invert the way it's applied on the surface
T Weight allows you to control the amount of rain and puddle you want on your surface.
Scroll to the Rain (T) Layer to find additional properties to play with. The drop-down menu gives you more control over how you would like your Rain to behave.
These are the most important properties to adjust to your liking:
T Drip Tiling to adjust the size of your drips
T Drip Length to adjust the length of your drips
T Drip Strength to adjust the intensity for the drip normal map
T Droplets Tiling to adjust the size of your droplets.
T Ripple Motion to adjust the speed of the ripples.
T Ripple Size to adjust the size of your ripples.
To start using this shader, click on the Content Icon in the Dash bar, then select up to 3 materials. Drag and drop them on the surface while holding the Control (ctrl) key on your keyboard. This will bring a menu as shown below.
Select the option Apply Blend Material. Now you are all set. Next thing, you might want to do is tweak the parameters to make them to your liking. To do so, click on the Edit button in the Dash bar. Our Tools panel will open. While selecting the surface/Asset you applied the Blend Materal on. Click on the 3 lines shown on the top left, then choose the option Edit Blend Material.
If your mesh isn't a simple plane or other Dash primitive, but instead an active tool like the Road Tool, Terrain Tool or Cable Tool, those also generate Dash meshes, and baking in that case is done from the tool panel, by clicking on the Bake icon, and confirming the dialog that shows up. This will delete your tool, and convert its result to a regular UE5 static mesh. It is not undoable, so we recommend doing it once you're done editing your road, terrain, or cables.
To edit a Blend Material in Dash click on the Edit button up in the Dash bar. Our Tools panel will appear. While selecting the surface/Asset you applied the Blend Materal on. Click on the 3 lines shown on the top left, then choose the option Edit Blend Material. There you have a wide range of parameters you can edit. such as: Layer properties like hue, saturation, and tiling for complex texture creation
