Procedural Mesh Tools
Dash contains various tools which generate geometry: Road Tool, Terrain Tool, Cable Tool, etc...
Baking
These tools all generate an actor of type DashPreviewMeshComponent. This custom type allows us to have full control over the mesh generation performance & algorithms.
The first thing to know about mesh-based tools is that a baking icon 
on the Tools Panel is always just a click away, and will delete tool attached to your mesh, then convert the dash mesh to a regular UE5 static mesh.
There are many reasons why you may want to bake your Dash generated meshes:
Making them usable/visible on other computers that don't have Dash installed.
Using Nanite, vertex painting and other UE features.
Cleaning up your scene of tools you may not need anymore once you're done editing them.
Besides the baking feature in the Tools panel, you can also select the component of this mesh, and it'll have a button Create Static Mesh to convert it to a static mesh.
Terrain Tool
Creates a procedural mesh to be used as a ground - This terrain can be adjusted as you see fit with the easy-to-use controls within the Terrain Tool. For example, you can control the Height, Turbulence, and UV Scale, but you can also deform it with a height map or with splines. You can find the terrain tool by searching for it in Dash or by finding it in the Create menu.
Cable Tool
Create procedural cables between splines, objects, or scattered on top of meshes - It comes with a bunch of different settings making sure you can create cables fully procedurally easier than ever before. Perfect for city environments or jungle environments in Unreal Engine 5. Of course, you get full control of the amount of cables, their size, their gravity, and much more! You can find the cable tool by searching in Dash or in the Create menu.
Vine Tool
Create vines on the specified surfaces - This is perfect for any forest or overgrown environment as it lets you create procedural vines within 2 seconds on any surface or asset. As vines tend to have leaves on them, we have made it super easy to just CTRL drag and drop a leaf atlas from Dash's Content Library onto a surface and in 1 second you have vines with leaves attached spread throughout the asset/surface. You can then control the amount of growth, the sizes of the branches and the leaves, and much more. As easy as it can get!
You can of course also open the Vine tool by searching in Dash. Then you can assign an origin (it can be an empty actor or a curve) and a surface you want the vines to grow on. The third way of opening it is by searching for Draw Vines in Dash, this opens our Draw Mode and once you draw a curve you will see we automatically create vines along this curve for you! You can exit this Draw Mode by clicking ESC or the STOP button.
Road Tool
Creates a road/path mesh along the input curve/spline - If you ever have felt the need to have a procedural road in UE5, you will be happy to use this! Just draw a spline with Dash, assign it to the road tool, and voila, you have a road perfectly matching the shape of your spline. If you need it to align even more to your surface, you can find a Projection Mask under the Geometry section. Then, if you change the spline or the underlying surface, the road auto-adjusts. You can find the Road Tool by searching in Dash.
And as always you can customize the road with the normal sliders and toggles, getting the perfect result for your environment. Pro-tip, after you have created a road, you can assign it as a proximity mask in Surface Scatter, making sure there are no grass etc on the road.
Quick Pipe
Create mesh pipes along the input curves - If you think it is easy to draw splines just the way you would like to have pipes/cables, Quick Pipe is for you. Just assign one or several splines to the tool and you instantly get meshes created along the splines. These meshes are of course customizable with our normal sliders and toggles! You can find Quick Pipe by searching in Dash.
Draw Mesh
If you need a mesh in a custom shape, our Draw Mesh tool lets you draw any shape and we create a basic mesh in this shape. You can open it through the Create Menu or by searching for it. Once started you will be in our Draw Mode and once you draw any shape, we will create a matching mesh for you. You can continue and create how many you like and then just exit the Draw Mode with ESC or the STOP button and delete the ones you don't like.
Mesh Pattern
Mesh Pattern is a tool designed for creating procedural, tileable patterns, either using the included presets or creating your own with custom assets and patterns. It's perfect for roofs, walls, floors, or any other man-made surface that needs more depth and detail than a simple material.
You can find it either by search or from the Dash bar, in the Create -> Mesh Tools category. To start using it, simply assign one or several surfaces, and it will, by default, use the Tile A preset on your surface.
Presets
In order to cover most use cases of the Mesh Pattern, we have included more than 30 high-quality presets with different assets and patterns. For example, presets for Broken Floor, HerringBone, Tiles, and Bricks. To switch to another preset, simply expand the drop-down list at the top of Mesh Pattern and select another preset. If the assets of said preset are not already present in the level, they are automatically added.
Mesh Pattern on Curves/Splines
Instead of assigning a mesh or a flat surface as the surface object in Mesh Pattern, you can also use a curve or spline, perfect for creating fences or walls. When using the curves from our Draw Curves tool, you will get the best results if you draw mostly straight curves. If you want more rounded shapes, it's best to use our Draw Spline tool instead.
Settings
As with any Dash tools, you can, of course, adjust the results exactly to your liking. We recommend experimenting with the settings and reading their descriptions by hovering over them, but here is a summary of the settings available:
Base Properties: You can adjust the tile scale, angle, padding, and sink.
Noise: You can add noise to either the points or the meshes themselves.
Projection: You can project/push the pattern onto one or several objects.
Slice Tiles: Use a Boolean mesh to slice the pattern objects in a specific shape, for example, with a cube or a sphere.
Proximity Mask: Mask out an area around an object/curve or keep it just next to the object/curve.
Noise Mask: Remove random objects in the pattern according to a controlled noise.
Object Masking: Mask out an area around an object or keep it just next to it using raycasting.
Pattern Details: Add and control the pattern variation. And create an Area mesh for the custom presets.
It can happen that the pattern repetition doesn't fit well with the surface, and then you can use the slice feature to slice your tiles in any arbitrary shape using a Boolean mesh. This feature is also useful if you want to "cut" a perfect square or circular pattern in your pattern.
When you use the Slice feature of Mesh Pattern, we create new deformed meshes for this in the outlier. These meshes are special Dash meshes and thus need to be baked before shipping the game. Simply select the slice meshes and search for Bake Meshes in Dash to convert them to normal static meshes. Using the slice feature is a heavy process, so when it ain't needed, make sure to uncheck the Enable option to get the best possible performance of Mesh Pattern.
When using 3D meshes instead of flat planes, the pattern is applied to the biggest planar surface in local space. If you want to control where the pattern appears exactly, you can instead use Mesh Pattern on a flat plane and project it onto the 3D mesh and a specific surface/side. To get the best possible results, match the plane angle with the surface angle and then experiment with the Max Distance value to make sure it ain't projected onto anything other than the intended places.
When using the Projection feature of Mesh Pattern, you might need to use the flip toggle depending on whether your projection mesh is below or above the surface mesh.
Custom Presets
If our preset objects and patterns don't cover your use case, you can also create your own patterns with any assets. These can then be saved and used easily through the preset list, in all your projects.
Try and create the custom presets in the lowest Unreal version possible, as you can't use them in a lower Unreal version.
To create a custom preset, simply select one or more objects in your scene and assign them as Pattern Objects. Once you do this, you will notice that the placement of these assets matters, both relative to each other and to the Z axis. When you move, rotate, and scale the objects, you can see how the pattern adjusts on your surface.
You will get the best results by only rotating the Pattern Objects by full 90-degree increments.
For most patterns, you will need a special “area object” to define how big the pattern is relative to the pattern objects. You can create and add an area actor with the utility button "Create Area" at the bottom of the Mesh Pattern tool.
Now that you have defined your pattern with correct repetition, you might want to add some variation to it. By placing other objects very close to the ones defining the pattern and adding them as Pattern Objects, you can tell the tool to treat them as variation through the Pattern Details section. Set the Variation Threshold above zero and experiment with the amount of variations and the placement of the variation assets.
Once you are happy with your Pattern Objects and their pattern, you can save this pattern as a custom preset in order to reuse it easily. Simply open the preset drop-down and use the Create Pattern button to add your preset to the preset drop-down. When loading this custom preset in another project, if the objects are not part of that project, they will be automatically added.
If you don't see your pattern show up when selecting it, you may have gotten a LoadAsset error in the output log. To fix this, delete these newly added objects from the outlier and assign the custom preset again, and it will work as it should.
Adjusting Pattern Meshes
If you want to adjust the materials on the included preset meshes in Mesh Pattern, that is possible through the Material Edit tool. Select the Mesh Pattern output in the viewport and then open Material Edit through the Active Tools list in the top left corner of the Tools Panel.
Here you will be able to adjust the basic settings such as Hue, Saturation, Brightness, etc, but also add a layer of Dirt, Snow, or Rain. And a new inclusion is the ability to add a color variation directly from the Material Edit tool. By default, it is enabled and set to max strength in order to give the presets the best possible look, but if you want to turn it off or change the strength of the variation, you can do that through the variation settings in Material Edit for the Mesh Pattern.
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