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Dash Documentation

Dash is a world building ecosystem for Unreal Engine 5. It features a vast array of tools that cover the smallest to most complex tasks. Just to name a few:

Content Browser: Browse assets from any project, Megascans, Polyhaven, and much more.
Scatter: A suite of tools that help you scatter along curves, on a surface, decals, etc...
Physics: Intuitive physics tool to paint objects or drop objects.
Image Board: Familiar with Pureref and Miro? You're going to love this.
Channel packing, vines, blend material, pivot tools, color grading, asset export, etc...

To learn Dash, you can jump straight into our Getting Started Guide! 🔥

In this (work in progress) documentation, we hope to give you all the knowledge you need to thoroughly enjoy Dash.

Tip: We’ve got a Discord server rich with information and day-to-day problems being solved, so make sure to check it out! Join the Dash Discord Server

Dash is an Editor-only tool, meaning you can’t keyframe its properties in Sequencer, neither can you adjust it in-game.

AI Assistant

Quickstart

How it Works

Getting Started

Dash is a world building tool for Unreal Engine 5. It aims to solve every problem you face when creating 3d environments, from small things like automatic pivot setting, to scattering, physics-based asset placement, color grading, asset browsing, AI tagging, etc…

I’ll be showing you how to go from zero to hero, so let’s get started!

Downloading

If you’ve never tried it before, you can get a free trial, which is fully-featured, and requires no credit card info. You can start the this free trial when you later open Dash for the first time.

If you already have a paid license, you can proceed with the download and installation, you will be able to enter your existing license key later in Unreal Engine.

Installing

Before you start the installation process, make sure that you’ve closed all running Unreal Engine software.

During the installation, Dash will automatically detect all UE5 versions you’ve got available. In case it fails to get your UE5 path, help it by putting the engine’s installation path, which typically looks like this:

C:/Program Files/Epic Games/UE_5.X

Once you’ve set the path(s), click on next, and continue with the install.

As a final step in the installation, you will see a popup mentioning Console(s) Windows. This is an important step, as when you click OK on that popup one or two Console Windows will appear (depending on which UE versions you are installing Dash into). You must let these Console Windows run and close by themselves before proceeding to open Unreal Engine again. If these windows are closed before, our dependencies will not be installed properly, and then Dash will not work as it should.

License & Trial Setup

Once the installation is done, open Unreal Engine, and you’ll notice the Dash blue icon is now visible on the top left of the UE toolbar. Click on it, and the Dash bar, along with the license manager, will show up. From there, you have the following options:

If this is your first time using Dash, click on that button, then insert your email, and your trial will start right away

If you’ve got a license key (which gets sent by email on purchase), simply put it in the License Key field, then hit Activate, and that’s it.

If you’re planning to buy Dash, whether it’s before, after, or during a trial, click on the Buy icon to be redirected to our website, then buy one of the plans that suit you, and your email should receive the license key. Copy it from your email and paste it into Dash, and that’s it.

Once the license is activated, you can close the License Manager, and this is where the fun begins!

User Interface Basics

At its core, Dash is a simple bar that’s jampacked with features. We separated them into broad categories that define various tasks in your workflow:

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 UE projects! In this category, you will also find the reference image board tool, similar to Miro and PureRef.
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.

Creating a Simple Environment with Dash

We'll scatter some foliage on a plane, then mask it out with a curve, and set up a camera to make it all look good!

First, let's make a simple plane. In the Dash bar, go to Create -> Mesh Primitives -> Create Plane.

Next, let's assign to it a random material color.

I'll do the same thing with a sphere and a cylinder: Create -> Mesh Primitives -> Create Sphere/Cylinder.

As a side note, Unreal Engine's meshes are usually of type Static Mesh. Dash has a special type called Dash Preview Mesh Component. You can convert them to static meshes by selecting the mesh (like a plane) in your scene, then typing To Static Meshes or Bake in the Dash bar, then hitting Enter or clicking on the suggested action. This will convert it to a static mesh, and that mesh will now have its asset located at Content/Polygonflow/StaticMeshes. Additionally, you can also enable Nanite by typing "Enable Nanite" and selecting the suggested action "Actor Enable Nanite". I'll do both for my plane, sphere, and cylinder.

AI Assistant

Now that we have a ground, a sphere, and a cylinder, let's start using some tools!

Surface Scatter

First, we'll scatter the sphere on the ground. Go to Scatter -> Surface Scatter. Surface Scatter is an extremely flexible scatter solution that allows you to scatter instances on surfaces, be it meshes, landscapes, procedural meshes, dash meshes, other scatters, etc...

Dash has actions and tools. Actions are like "to static mesh" or "random material"; they're operations that work on your selection or some other context, and usually don't open any panel. Tools are like Surface Scatter: They open a panel, are non-destructive, and stick in your scene even when you restart Unreal Engine, until you delete them for good. When you open Surface Scatter, the Dash Tools Panel will show up and house your Surface Scatter:

Next, we'll draw a curve across our plane, and use it to remove some scattered spheres, which will give us a nice little path. To draw the curve, go to Create -> Curve Tools -> Draw Curve. This will start the curve context mode, and if you drag your mouse around the viewport with the left-mouse button pressed, a curve will be drawn. Additionally, you'll also notice that the Dash bar changes the buttons it shows, and now has options relevant to this specific tool. We can increase the number of points for our curves, smooth them, etc... Keep in mind, this works on even existing splines! Just select them, run the tool, and start smoothing/resampling them.

And now, let's use it to mask our instances!

The Dash Tools Panel is selection-sensitive; meaning if you select the scattered spheres, it'll show the tool attached to it. If you have multiple Dash tools running in your scene, just select their output, which in our case is those instanced spheres, and the panel will show you the tool bound to it.

Scroll down in the properties view until you see a group called Proximity Masking. Expand it, and with your curve selected, add it to the Objects property by clicking on the "+" icon, or double clicking on the property itself.

Surface Scatter is filled with amazing masking features: Landscape layers, raycasting, textures, volumes, sunlight, directional, height, vertex colors, clumping, angle, noise, mesh border, etc... As a brief side note, here's how easy it is to mask by texture: Load up the texture in your project, make sure your mesh has UVs, give it to Surface Scatter, and voilà. PS: You can clear your property from some objects by Right click -> Clear Objects, or Right Click -> Reset to Default.

Path Scatter

Back to our scene, the next step is to scatter the cylinder mesh we built earlier along the path, to have some kind of wooden posts. To do this, we'll use another tool called Path Scatter. Go to Scatter -> Path Scatter in the Dash bar, and its properties should show up in the properties panel. Give it the cylinder and the curve, and it'll do its magic.

Surface Scatter will scatter on geometry, while Path Scatter will scatter on curves. If you give Path Scatter some geometry, it'll try to scatter on its border meshes, but that's about it. This distinction is very important when thinking about what you're working on. lamp posts along a road? Path Scatter. Pebbles along a road? Surface Scatter. etc...

Since our cylinder originally had a uniform size, I made some adjustments in the Scale Properties group by enabling Use Custom Scale, then toying with the min/max on all axes until I get the look I'm after. I then switched the pivot mode to Bottom. Path Scatter and Surface Scatter both have this pivot mode system, which allows you to override the original pivot of the object you're scattering. This can be very useful as you interact with content from asset libraries, all having different pivot standards/qualities.

Next, let's go to the group Path Width, and play with the width value! Let's also open the group Feature Masking, and pass our plane to the Projection Mask property. This ensures that all instances that aren't above the plane don't get spawned.

References

Look at that! We've got ourselves a cool little scene. Let's do a couple of things to make it all a bit more intuitive. First, both Surface Scatter and Path Scatter rely on the curve to set up a path with a given width. What we want to do is have the property in both tools to be controlled by one value, just so we don't have to jump between them anytime we feel like making the path wider. This is where References come in: You can right-click on a property, like say Distance in Proximity Masking, then create a reference property out of it. Then back in Surface Scatter, you can right-click on the Parallel distance, and assign to it your newly created reference. You can even double-click on the name of the property to change it!

When you make a numerical (float, integer) property a reference, you'll notice a Weight value appear on the right side of the slider. This weight is unique to each referenced property. So for example, while both the sphere and cylinder instances now share the same path width, you could tweak the weight on the spheres to make a bit of space between them and the cylinders.

In the video above, we're creating a Scene Container property, which can hold objects in our scene. We're giving it our curve, then going to our Path and Surface Scatter tools to make them use that reference instead of the curve directly. This makes it easy to add, replace, edit or do whatever we want with our reference, and see all tools update.

Compounds

When right-clicking on a property, you'll notice that we have a "Compound" section in the menu that shows up. In short, compounds are custom tools that can be used to group properties from multiple tools. For example, the setup we have so far could be a compound called "Path Creator", and in it, we could expose some reference properties, some regular properties, etc... from any number of tools. You can't create compound properties, you can only add existing properties to them.

In the video below, we start by Right-Click -> Add to New Compound on a property, then we do this again and again on multiple properties until we've covered all the basics. From then on, we don't need to even touch Path Scatter or Surface Scatter; this is our hub from which all major adjustments are made.

Editing Several Existing Tools

As you accumulate tools, it's important to keep in mind that there are multiple ways of accessing them to keep editing them later on:

By selecting their result in the scene they will pop up in the Tools Panel and you can continue to edit them.

Detailing

With just a few primitives and some scatter passes, we can create a really cute scene. In the screenshot below, we've created a few more spheres, scattered some on the ground, some on other scatters, etc... We've also used some of the scattered instances as proximity; you can see the dark green spheres are mostly clustered near the orange spheres, and that's because we used the orange spheres as proximity mask.

Camera & Grading

Finally, let's make a shot out of this! Go to Create -> Common -> Create Camera. This will create a Dash camera, which is a custom blueprint tailored for cinematic shots. The viewport will automatically switch to this camera, and the tools panel will also show its properties. From there, we can start toying with the color grading presets, shuffle through them, adjust the aspect ratio, bloom, etc... This part is mostly messing around with values and figuring out what works.

I then added a water plane from Create -> Common -> Water Plane, scaled and moved it around a bit, and here's the final result:

Closing

User Interface

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.

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

Dash Bar

This widget is your main gateway to Dash, and is jampacked with features:

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 UE projects! In this category, you will also find the reference image board tool, similar to Miro and PureRef.
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 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.

Dash AI Assistant

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.

Does Polygonflow save my questions & AI answers on their servers?

Yes we do. We use that data to better improve Dash, and only that. For example, we might see that a lot of users ask how to scatter moss, and we'll take it as a signal that we need to ship a moss preset for the tool Surface Scatter. We might also notice that the answers from the AI assistant have a pattern of being unhelpful in a certain way, and that would be a good signal for us to adjust and deploy it again.

Tools Panel

Panel Features

Let's go from top to bottom and describe all the features in this panel. First, you'll notice that it always spawns at the center-right corner of your viewport, and scaling your viewport also changes its position to make it fit that place.

View Tools: This will open a dropdown list showing all tools that are currently running in your scene.
Hide All: This will hide the result (meshes from cable tool, scattered instances, etc...) of all Dash tools in your viewport. An easy way to quickly identify what's from Dash and what isn't.
Show All: This shows all Dash tool results.
Freeze All: Dash tools will update whenever their inputs change. For example, if you've got some cables hanging by a curve, moving that curve will update the cable geometry. Same with scattering; scaling or rotating the surface/ground you're scattering on will update the scatter. Freezing will block that process, and let you adjust your scene as you see fit, without Dash tools ever updating their generated actors.
Unfreeze All: This will make all Dash tools update again when you change their properties or adjust actors they depend on in the scene.
Show Execution Time: This will show you a small counter in millisecond to the left of the "Tools Panel" text. When the active tool runs, that timer updates, indicating how much time Dash took.
Move Right: Moves & snaps the panel to the right corner of the viewport, which is the default position.
Move Left: Moves & snaps the panel to the left corner of the viewport.
Move Top Right: Moves & snaps the panel to the top right corner of the viewport.
Move Top Left: Moves & snaps the panel to the top left corner of the viewport.
Detach Active Tool: This will open another panel that contains the active tool. Sometimes you might want to have a few panels open side by side when adjusting values, and detaching a panel will help you do exactly that.

Next, we've got the active tool's workspace:

Dash has different types of tools, each serving a specific purpose.

Transient Tools: These are tools that are selection-specific. For example, if you select an object that has a Dash material or Blend material assigned to it, you can find the Material Edit or Blend Material tool in this menu. Same with editing a Dash camera; first make sure that your viewport is set to it, then you'll see the Edit Camera transient tool available in the tools list. Same for fog, too.
Regular Tools: These are tools like Surface Scatter, Decal Scatter, Road Tool, Terrain Tool, etc...

I can't find the material tool

First, make sure that you select one or multiple objects that have a Dash material. Megascans & PolyHaven assets have those when you import them from the Dash Content Browser. Same for fog cards and Blend Materials. With your object selected, open the Tools Panel, then in the top left click on the menu icon to view all active tools in your scene. You should see under the "Transient Tools" category an Edit Material option. Click on it, and you'll be able to adjust the material. PS: Dash materials are just regular UE materials; you can also adjust them from the usual Unreal Engine material instance panel.

How to create a Reference Property?

You can make one from scratch or create one from an existing property.

Right-Click on any given property, then select the Convert to Reference option. This will create a reference property that has the name, value and range of the property you Right-Clicked on. From there, you can double-click on the property's name to change it, and Right-Click on another property to assign this new one to it.

To make one from scratch, open the tools menu from the Dash Tools Panel, then you'll see all the way down either "Reference Tool" or "Create Reference Tool". Click on either one, then the Tools Panel should switch to the reference tool view. There, you'll notice a + plus icon that you can click on to create any property type you want. You can double click on a property's name to change it, and right-click on it to adjust its range in case it's a float/integer. Right-click is also where you can delete it. To assign it, go to your regular tool, like Surface Scatter, and right-click on a property of the same type. For example, if the reference property you created is of type float, you could use it to adjust the Max Scale property in Surface Scatter. Right-Click on Max Scale, then select "Assign Float" or whatever the name of your property. Right-click on the property again to find the option to remove it.

What can I do with compound tools?

Compound tools can be thought of like a hub for properties that are coming from multiple tools. Soon, we'll give you the ability to export them and their dependencies, making them interactive content generators, basically.

Next to the tools list, you have the name of the current tool. This one's fairly straightforward: Double-click on it to rename it, and that's about it. The name always shows up in blue, to indicate that it's the active tool. Similarly, hovering over icons will switch their color to blue, to indicate that you're above them/their option.

Next to the name, we've got the Active Tool menu. This one contains options that are specific to the tool you're currently editing, whilst the tools menu we discussed before is global; as it has options to hide all tools, or freeze all tools, etc...

Create Preset: This option allows you to create a preset from all the current property values you've set up. When you click on it, the preset panel will open up, and you can give your preset a name and description, and also decide if you want it to ignore objects used in the tool, in case you'll be using it in other scenes for example.
Select Results: Selects the result of the tool. If the active tool generates cable meshes, this will select them in your scene. If it generates instances, this will also select them.
Reset Properties: Resets all property values of the active tool.
Execute Tool: Runs the tool. This will force an execution of the tool, unless it is frozen.
Hide Output: Hides the result of the tool. If you click on it, then open the menu again, it'll have an option "Show Output".
Freeze Tool: Freezes the tool from any future updates. If you open the menu again, it'll show "Unfreeze Tool" instead.
View in Explorer: Open the folder in which the source code of this tool resides. Dash tools use a lot of C++ and other binary libraries, but their core logic is laid out in Python, which makes them easy to tinker with.
Delete Tool: Permanently deletes the current tool. This won't delete its output, just the tool itself, meaning it won't be parametric anymore. This action is not undoable.

Tool Features

A Dash tool typically has a set of properties, all residing in various groups. By default, you'll have a bunch of properties in a group called Base Properties. You can expand or collapse this group, and scroll down to view and expand/collapse other groups.

Dash tools have various properties, each serving a different purpose.

Float / Integer: These are two classic numerical properties that. Floats are the most common type, while Integers can often be used for object count and other fixed values.
Dropdown: This type contains various options to pick from. For instance, some tools have a dropdown to override your object's pivot to top, bottom or center.
Boolean: This is a checkbox, and allows you to toggle a value on or off. An example might be switching off "Receive Decals" on a tool like Road Tool; which would make the road geometry not receive decals even if they're above it.
Button: Some tools have a button that's used to start the tool, instead of the usual runtime execution workflow where adjusting any property updates the tool. The Channel Packer tool is one example, where you can set up all your channels, and once you're happy with the result, hit "Create Texture" to start the conversion process.
String: Some tools have a textual field where you can write some text. In the tool Surface Scatter, you can mask your objects by giving it the name of your terrain material layer. This is where this property type comes in handy.
Asset Container: This is a less common but still very useful type: It helps you to connect any asset from the UE content browser to this tool. For example, when using the channel packer you need to select a texture in the UE content browser, then in the tool, hit the + icon on one of the corresponding texture slots to query and add your current selection. It works exactly like the Scene Container property, except this one exclusively interacts with assets, not actors.

Content Browser

The "Content" button on the Dash bar opens the Content Browser. Why use this instead of UE's native content browser?

Dash is rich with lots of tools that rely on content, and making it easy to blend the content & the tools is a top priority for us. For example, you should be able to just drag a plant from our Content Browser onto the viewport, then hold CTRL+Release your mouse, and scatter it, or make vines out of it, or scatter it along a spline in case it's a lamp post, etc...
People often have content they built, content from Megascans, Dekogon, Sierra Division, PolyHaven, some free asset pack of the month, etc... We've built dedicated features for Megascans & PolyHaven, and are actively working to extend support for more content creators/libraries. This means better/faster interaction with those libraries.
Your own content can be hard to sift through, and we've integrated a world-class AI tagging solution to make all your objects easy to find.
We've also made it possible to browse & import all content from all your projects inside the one you're current working with!
Later in the year (2025), you'll be able to not just browse local but also free or paid content, and purchase it right from this panel. This will make content acquisition an afterthought, as you no longer have to go through the UE Marketplace, or Gumroad, or any of the billion other variants that sell content packs. Just type "barrel", see the one you like, buy it for a few bucks, and that's it.

Basics

The Content Browser is split into 4 vertical slices:

The top one has its title, then a dropdown containing all the libraries we currently support:

Starting from Dash 1.8.5, when you download assets from the FAB plugin, these assets will now be added to the new FAB view in the Dash Content Browser.

This new feature supports Megascans assets and the FBX and GLT format for other free and paid assets inside the FAB plugin. Important to note though, that it is also dependent on how the creator has shipped their assets, so some FBX/GLT assets may not show up in the new FAB view anyhow.

For the Megascans assets from FAB, you will have access to our Material Edit and Blend Material tools. These tools do not support the other FAB assets right now though.

Quixel (Old) is a massive scan library of 18K+ assets, created by the team Quixel, which was acquired by Epic Games in 2019. You have access to regular 3D objects like rocks or trash cans, tillable surfaces like forest grounds and brick walls, 3d plants, atlas textures, decals, and much more. We've written an extensive guide on how to get this library set up, and get the most out of it.

We've built a fairly big materials library, and most of them are tailored for Megascans, but we'll make them work for more libraries in the future, too.

As of 2025, you can no longer download new assets from the Bridge Plugin or the standalone Bridge. But if you have downloaded Megascans assets from before, you can easily access them in Dash still.

PolyHaven is an open source PBR asset library, comprising of high quality 3D assets, HDRIs, and tillable textures. The HDRIs alone make this library a must have for anyone creating environments with Dash.

There are some assets that are built specifically for Blender, which means they won't work nicely in Dash. Trees are such assets, as they seem to use geometry nodes for their leaves.

IES Library gives you access to high quality lighting information presets. Think of it like the shape of the light that's emitted by light fixtures. The linked website is a repository of such shapes, all provided by manufacturers, and ready to use to make your scene shine.

Dash gives you the ability to browse all your 3D assets and materials in its content browser. Not only that, you can also use its AI tagging capabilities to make your content easier to search through.

Unlike Megascans or PolyHaven, when you drag & drop one of your assets from Dash onto the viewport, its material will remain the one you originally assigned to the asset, instead of one we automatically assign to it.

We go into detail about how your custom content works with Dash in here.

In addition to browsing the content of your current project, you also have the ability to browse the assets of other Unreal Engine projects that reside on your computer!

This feature is easy to set up, just follow the quick guide right here.

This library will display all the assets in all the views in one place. You could for example have some great assets in PolyHaven, some in Megascans and some in another UE project, and this view would allow you to see them all in one place.

Next, you have (from left to right):

The search bar in which you can type keywords such as object names or object colors. Some examples: rusty bucket, red carpet, car, rock, stone, garbage, damaged, etc.
- You can also use semantic search, for example "food", and get assets that are named apple, pear, can.
- You can also use boolean operators as + and -. For example, searching for "Forest -Rocks" will give you all the forest-related assets but exclude all your rocks. Another example could be "Flowers +Bushes". Right now it is important to use keyword and then a space before the operator and the next keyword.

The next slice is a simple notification area that's also specific to your current library. It shows a simple message about the library your currently in, and if available, one or multiple buttons that may be of use for that specific library.

Finally, you've got the library itself; which is a typical thumbnail grid that you can scroll through to view all your assets.

Collections

As of Dash 1.9.0 we have introduced a collection system into the Dash Content Browser. This lets you organize your assets in any way you like, regardless of asset library.

Once you open up the current folder hierarchy on the left side with the folder icon in the top left corner, you will now see below your folders this new collections area. Simply press the + icon to create a new collection and then you can rename it by double clicking or right clicking on it. Then it is just a matter of drag and dropping your assets into your collections. If you hold SHIFT you can select several 3D assets and drop them all at one time. To remove one or several assets from a collection, simply drag and drop the assets onto the empty space in the collections area.

As the Dash Content Browser is designed to work great for teams working together on a UE5 project, this new collections feature does that as well. All you have to do is right-click on a collection and click "Make Shared". This will create a shared copy of said collection and this data is stored within the UE project, so no need to share any additional data with your teammates. If a teammate has made changes to a shared collection, you will see a notification and get the option to either load or overwrite those changes.

FAB

Starting from Dash 1.8.5, when you download assets from the FAB plugin, these assets will now be added to the new FAB view in the Dash Content Browser. This means you can use the FAB assets as easily as you have previously used Megascans assets from the Bridge plugin. Fab doesn't actually copy the assets in your project and instead seems to store some cached version. If you drag & drop the assets from Dash's content browser, this isn't an issue: We load the assets in your project, and everything runs smoothly from there.

This new feature supports Megascans assets and the FBX and GLT format for other free and paid assets inside the FAB plugin. Important to note, though, that it is also dependent on how the creator has shipped their assets, so some FBX/GLT assets may not show up in the new FAB view anyhow.

For the Megascans assets, you will have access to our Material Edit and Blend Material tools as you are used to when using Megascans assets from the Bridge Plugin. These tools do not support the other FAB assets right now though.

If you don't see any FAB assets in the new FAB view, it is best to double-check in the FAB plugin settings what the Cache Directory Path is, and then make sure to set this path in the Dash-Preferences Fab settings. You can find these settings by clicking the right-side menu in the FAB tab and choosing Set Folders. Then you only have to click on the paper clip icon on the row "Fab UE Cache Path" and save the path you copied from the Fab Plugin. After you have done that, there exists a reload button in the right-side menu in the Fab tab, Check New Assets.

Worth pointing out that in order to get Displacement/Tesselation working properly with the Megascans assets from FAB, you need to download the materials in High Quality as they don't ship normal Displacement maps as they did through the Bridge Plugin

Megascans / Quixel

Megascans is a high-end content library that's available for free to all Unreal Engine users. It features nearly 15,000 assets, with various subcategories: 3D objects, decals, surfaces, 3D plants, etc... We've got an extensive guide on this library right here, but for now let's get things set up quickly:

First, you need to make sure that you've downloaded some assets through the Quixel Bridge plugin, which is natively available in UE5.
Once you've downloaded some, Right-Click on an asset, then Go to Files, and copy the parent folder, which usually looks like R:\Megascans Library\Downloaded\UAssets
The Preferences panel will open up, and from there, set the Bridge Plugin Path to the path you've copied before. You'll notice that there's a second path Bridge Software Path, which allows you to add support for Atlases, an asset type that's available in the Bridge standalone software, but not the UE plugin. More on that here.
Hit Save, and that should do it! Dash's Content Browser should now start to fill up with all your Megascans assets. If it doesn't, restart UE and see if it works. Worst case, reach out to us.

Why use Dash for Megascans instead of the native Bridge plugin?

Navigating content from Megascans, Polyhaven, your own, some marketplace's, etc... can be quite the time sink. In an ideal world, if you were looking for a chair or a rock, you'd just type "chair" or "rock", and find the content you need, regardless of its origin or even naming quality. That ideal world exists, and it's called Dash.

Can I download Megascans assets inside Dash?

Unfortunately you can't. Quixel Bridge doesn't have a public API that makes it easy for us to distribute their content, which means you'll have to download the assets in the Bridge plugin for them to be available in Dash.

Can I import content for the Bridge standalone software?

Dash only supports the Atlas asset type from the Bridge software. We're planning to add support for regular FBX/OBJ import to remedy this problem, but that isn't available yet.

Does this still work in 2025?

As of 2025, you can no longer download new assets from the Bridge Plugin or the standalone Bridge. But if you have downloaded Megascans assets from before, you can easily access them in Dash still.

Polyhaven

This free & open source library provides high-quality content that you can download right inside Dash. Using it is fairly simple: Switch to this library in the dropdown, then click on the download icon on the asset of your choice to download it. Once the download is done, drag & drop it onto your scene, and voilà.

The folder in which Polyhaven content gets downloaded is automatically set by Dash, though you can change it by going into the Preferences -> Path Settings section.

We're proud sponsors of this open source initiative, and if you find yourself enjoying their content, be sure to donate!

Some Polyhaven assets don't seem to work. Why?

There are some assets like trees which are built for Blender primarily, making them hard to automatatically set up in Unreal Engine. Most of the content should work, but if something's off, chances are the content is just not easy to import in UE.

My thumbnails aren't showing / I can't seem to download assets in Polyhaven

If the thumbnails are not loading or you're unable to download the assets, try this:

Close UE5
Delete this folder ..documents\PolygonFlow\ContentLibrary\PolyHaven
Open UE 5and start Dash, then open the Content Browser.
Go to Polyhaven library menu and click Redownload library data.
Once the library is populated, try to download the assets again.
If this fails, please reach out to us on Discord or at info@polygonflow.io

Current Project - Organizing Your Custom Assets

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.

Most importantly though, Dash's Content Browser aims to be a unified space to navigate all your assets. This includes local content, Megascans, content from other projects, etc...

If you click on the libraries dropdown and go to Current Project, this is what the view will look like:

The folder hierarchy on the left is the one you have in the UE content browser, and the count on each is the number of static meshes or materials available in the folders. 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. You can enable or disable AI tagging by using the checkmark within the compute button.

Why would you disable tagging? Tagging is a financially costly process for us, which means we have to limit it to 4000 assets (20K for enterprise users) you can tag per month. Therefore, we recommend you to tag the assets you'll need by picking specific folders and tagging them, vs processing everything. You could for example compute everything, then tag the folders whose content you want to tag.

If you have AI tagging enabled, this means that once your assets have been computed, they are now searchable by properties and colors. Making it easier than ever before to find your assets!

Starting from Dash 1.9.0, besides meshes and blueprints, we also compute materials by default. But in case you want to disable that, you can right click on any folder and choose exclude Materials.

The computing process takes time, as we load your assets into memory and render thumbnails out of them, then use OpenAI's vision API to extract relevant tags from each asset. The compute is a RAM-intensive process, so it can be a good idea to not compute all of your assets at the same time.

If an asset fails to compute, its thumbnail will have some info informing you of that, and you can recompute it by right-clicking on it, and clicking Recompute.

As of Dash 1.9.0, the Dash metadata that is created when you compute your assets in the Dash Content Browser is now saved directly in your Unreal Engine project, making it as easy as sharing your project to see all the Dash content browser data for any member of your team.

For those Unreal projects where you have computed assets before Dash 1.9.0, we have added an option in the Dash preferences to move the metadata from the old path directly into your Unreal project.

I've computed some assets, but it's taking too long

The computation process takes a lot of time right now, as we have to load up all your assets into a headless UE5 instance, render a thumbnail, then go to the next. The amount of assets you have could be well above the amount your RAM's limit, for example. We've made a couple of contingencies like gracefully stopping the process and allowing you to restart it, but most importantly, we recommend computing assets in batches, like computing 100-250 assets in a specific folder, then moving to then next, etc... A restart of UE would also help, as that clears it from your RAM.

Can I tag more than the monthly limit?

We don't have any clean way of increasing your tagging limit for now. We're looking to introduce some top-up plan in the near future, but for now, reaching out to us on Discord/email to request an increase in your limit is the only available option.

What asset types can I compute?

Static meshes, blueprints (with meshes inside) and materials are currently supported.

Can I clear my computed assets?

Yes. Make sure you're in the "Project Library" tab in the Content Browser, then go to the menu, and click Delete Cache.

How do I compute materials?

If you want to see your materials in the Dash Content Browser, locate the specific folder that contains your materials in the 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 computer.

External Projects - Centralised Asset Browser Between Projects

Dash also lets you browse, search and use content from any other project on your computer! Go to the Project Library tab, then in the menu, you can either add another project where you have computed some assets manually, or you can click Manage Project Libraries, which will bring you to the Dash preferences where you can use an automatic search for other external projects. Then you can unselect the projects you don't want shown in the Dash Content Browser.

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.

For more information on using the Centralized Asset Browser, you can check this dedicated page: Centralized Asset Browser

FAQ

How do I show the asset names?

Yes, if you click on the Content Browser's menu (dots icon, top right corner of the content browser), there's an option to view asset names.

Can I view the asset's details before importing it?

Yes, if you click on the Content Browser's menu (dots icon, top right corner of the content browser), there's an option to view asset details. Once it's enabled, selecting on any given asset will show the you following properties about it:

Texture resolution.
Triangle count.
Asset scale. This is represented by a square with a character for reference, and hovering over that scale will display the width x height x depth scale.

Can I make the thumbnails bigger?

Yes, hold CTRL with your mouse over the Content Browser's view, then use the scroll wheel to scale the thumbnails up or down.

Can I view the triangle count of an asset before importing it?

Yes, if you click on the Content Browser's menu (dots icon, top right corner of the content browser), there's an option to view asset details, which will ensure that the triangle count of that asset is visible when you click on it.

How to use the Favorites feature?

On hover, every asset will show you a star icon to set or unset an asset as favorite. Once you have some assets that are set as favorite, a star icon will show up on the right corner of the Content Browser's search bar. Click on it, and all your favorite assets will show up at the top.

Can I edit an asset's tags?

Yes, right-click on the asset, then select Asset Details, and a panel will open up, showing all the asset's details, including a list of tags it has. From Dash 1.9.0 you can also double-click on an asset to open the Asset Details.

You can then start typing in tags, then hitting enter to register them, or hover over them, and double-click on the X icon to the right of each tag to delete it. Once you're happy with your changes, hit the Save button at the bottom left.

Can I add or remove tags to multiple assets at once?

Yes. Use SHIFT+Click to select multiple assets, right-click on any of them, then select Batch Tag Edit. This will open up a panel in which all the tags of all the assets are visible, and any new tag you add will get added to all of them. Any tag you remove will also get removed from all of them. Once you're happy with your changes, hit the Save button at the bottom left.

There's a specific asset I like; how do I view more assets similar to it?

Right-click on it, then select View Similar, and that should display all the assets that are similar to yours.

I can't seem to get the CTRL + Drop right to scatter from the Content Browser

Click (or SHIFT+Click for multiple objects) on an asset, then start dragging it onto the viewport. You'll notice the Content Browser will shrink in size to give your viewport more space. Before releasing the left-mouse button, hold CTRL, then release. And you should see a menu pop up with a couple of options, including one to scatter.

Do I need the Content Browser to scatter assets?

No. Dash's Content Browser is a highly convenient way of managing your content, but all our scatter tools work without it, too. We briefly cover the scatter workflow right here.

How to scatter along a curve when drag & dropping from the Content Browser?

Select the curve in the viewport, and with your asset selected, follow this step to show the CTRL+Drop menu, and this time pick Scatter on Selection.

Dash Image Board

As an artist, having a quick and easy way of sorting out all your ideas in one image board is a fairly common practice, with tools like Pureref, Miro ando thers being the best at this. Dash features a similar tool, but with a few key differences: It's fully integrated into Unreal Engine, has all the usual features you'd expect from a reference tool, allows you to take a snapshot of your UE viewport and put it in the Dashboard, lets you extract color grading from any image to apply it on your Dash camera, and much more!

In short, the Dashboard is a convenient ideation space where all your ideas, be it visual or textual, can be grouped. You can drag & drop images or even image URLs onto the panel to import them, you can group them, label them, etc...

When you open it for the first time, you'll be greeted with an empty view. From there, just drag & drop images onto the board, and start adjusting them as you see fit.

Besides that, all the regular features like making the window frameless, focusing on the selection, lowering the opacity, etc... are also available.

We'll be making a dedicated page to this tool soon, and it's still in its early development phase, but the idea is to give you a space where most of you can organize images, content tools, ideas, etc... Picture putting an image, then asking the tool "how do I make this", and getting recommendations for the best tools in Dash that can help you get the job done. Not only tools extraction, but also content, and atmospherics, etc.. All the way to grading extraction and even feedback suggestion. These upcoming AI features of the Dashboard won't be using your data for any training purpose, ever.

Hotkeys

FAQ

Basics

What type of projects can Dash be used for?

Dash can be used for game development, archviz, environment art, and any other projects you may be doing in Unreal Engine that involve building an environment. Right now it works best for sections of a larger environment or smaller environments in general, the detailing capabilities, ease of use and control you get with Dash is unlike anything else out there. And we are of course improving it continuously to make sure it works equally well for larger environments.

Does Dash have an API?

We don't have a public-facing API for Dash, though its codebase for creating, querying and editing tools and their data is fairly simple. We profile a few examples in this page.

Workflow

Can I scatter without using Dash's Content Browser?

Yes. Click on Scatter on the Dash bar to view the scatter tools, then open the tool Surface Scatter. With your terrain/ground actor selected, click on the "+" icon of the Surface property to set your selection as your surface, then do the same for a different actor to set it as your Scatter, and that's about it!

How do I convert Dash's custom mesh type to Static Mesh?

Tools like Road & Terrain create a custom Dash geometry called DashPreviewMeshComponent. While editing in the Dash Tools Panel, you'll notice that such tools have a Bake icon that shows up. Click on it, and you'll be prompted to convert your geometry, which would remove the tool & the custom geometry, and leave you with a static mesh. You can also just type "to static mesh" in the Dash bar with your custom mesh types selected, and the suggested operation will do roughly the same thing.

How do I convert Dash's Instances and break the tool connection?

Our Scatter tools and Physics Paint tool create HISM instances (same as UE foliage or UE PCG) and this means that usually there is no need to convert them to anything else. But if you do want or need to convert them or brake the tool connection there exist a few options:

From within the Scatter Tool in question, open the menu and click Delete, that will delete the tool and thus break the connection so you can't edit the result anymore with our tool. But the result will of course exist in the environment. The result is still an HISM. This connection would also be broken if you delete the original mesh you are scattering, or for example, the spline you have used in a Path Scatter.
If you search for Merge Actors in Dash, you can find an action that lets you merge several actors into one actor. Perfect for cases where you have several static meshes and want to combine them into one mesh, for example, if you have used the Dash Physics Drop Tool. To use Merge Actors, simply select the result in the scene and then run the action. This action is also useful for converting an HISM instance (scatter result or physics paint result) into one single static mesh. This also breaks the tool connection so you can't edit it anymore.
If you search for Convert to Foliage in Dash, you can find an action that lets you convert your Scatter or Physics paint result (HISM) into UE foliage. This breaks the tool connection and gives you the ability to use the normal foliage tool in UE to paint delete/add on the result to further customize it. The result is still a HISM but, it will respect World partitioning which could be very good in certain scenarios. And another bonus is that you can replace the scattered objects with blueprints if you want. So if you know you are 100% certain you don't need to adjust the settings in Surface Scatter any more, doing this conversion is recommended. To use Convert to Foliage, simply select the result in the scene and then run the action.
If you search for Bake Instances in Dash, you can find an action that lets you bake your scatter result or your Physics Paint results into individual static meshes. It is a heavy operation but can be useful if you really need to move each object individually as a last step in your scatter process. To use Bake Instances, simply select the result in the scene and then run the action.
If you are using the procedural meshes in Dash, Terrain, Vines, Cables etc, it is good to know that you can you can convert these from our custom mesh type to ordinary static meshes by using the action To Static Meshes.

Can I mask my scatter by landscape material layer?

Yes you can! In the tool Surface Scatter, if you scroll down a bit in the properties you'll notice a group called Landscape Layer Masking. You can give to its properties the name of a landscape layer, like let's say "grass", and it'll ensure that your scattered grass is only kept in that layer.

Can I change my pivot with Dash?

That's possible yes! Dash has a few options to set the pivot on the currently selected actors. Go to the Place menu in the dash bar, then expand the Pivot Tools group, and there you'll be able to set the pivot to the center, top or bottom. Keep in mind, this changes the pivot of the actor, not the asset it's bound to.

Does Dash have a blend material and how does it work?

Yes Dash lets you create a blend material with 3 or 4 materials. Right now this only works with Megascans materials from our Content Library and it only works on Static Meshes or the Dash Custom Meshes, like our terrain, but of course we hope to expand this soon! To use it, simply, hold SHIFT to select 3 or 4 materials from the Dash Content Library, hold CTRL and drag them onto your scene, and then release the mouse over your surface and choose Blend Material. This will open the tool and let you fully customize it! P.S. the order you select the materials matter.

How doe I sink scattered assets below the ground?

In Surface Scatter and other scatter tools, we have a sink property that lets you move the scatters up and down easily!

Can I use Dash to create animated scenes?

Dash tools work only in editor mode right now, we are looking into making it possible to animate them but no clear timeline on this. But of course you can still use Dash to build the environment for your animated scene, but you can't change any Dash tool parameters within your animation.

For what projects can I use Dash?

As Dash is built to help you build environments in UE5 faster and easier, it can be used for any project where you need to build a world or just assemble some assets together. As we have many different tools and features in Dash these days, some are certainly more useful for certain projects. Right now we have users from several industries such as architectural visualization, gaming, product visualization, environment art, and automotive.

Can I use Dash for large scale environments?

Usually, when creating large worlds this means scattering lots of assets and that of course can be very heavy on the performance. One thing you can do to decrease the amount of assets needed is merging them together in batches and then scattering the batches of trees for example instead of trees individually. This being said we are constantly trying to optimize our tools to work well for larger environments, in Dash 1.8 we ship a fix so that it should work decently even if you scatter on an 8K landscape. But the performance of this of course heavily depends on your PC specs.

How do I fix issues with overlapping objects in Dash scatter?

For Path Scatter we have added a Density Mode called Fix, which will choose a density that makes the assets fit just right for your given curve and assets. You can customize the result with different options. For Surface Scatter, the best way of dealing with this is adjusting the density to find the perfect value.

Can I pause or freeze tools?

Yes you can! Inside most of the tools in Dash, we have a freeze function inside the tool menu!

Licensing & Pricing

Where do I find my license key?

We send it to the email you've used to buy Dash. Make sure to check the spam, and if you still can't find it, please reach out at support@polygonflow.io or to our Discord.

How many Enterprise Seats do I need?

You only need seats for those artists who want access to the tools and the ability to adjust parameters. You do not need licenses for Build Machines, but you do need to install the Unreal Plugin of Dash.

From a PC where you have Dash installed with a license, copy the "GraphNUnrealPlugin" file from the [UNREAL_ENGINE_INSTALLATION]/Engine/Plugins/Marketplace/ folder to the same place on other PCs. This is needed from Dash 1.7 and upwards.

Are there any volume discounts or site licenses available?

Can I use my license on 2 computers?

Our freelance and student licenses come with the ability to be activated on 2 PCs. If you have an enterprise license and want to switch PC or need to switch to a third computer, you need to open the License Manager and deactivate your license first. It is located inside the Preferences panel in the main Dash menu. Then you are able to activate it on the other computer.

If you are unable to deactivate it on one PC, maybe if you don't have access to it anymore, please send an email to support@polygonflow.io and we can deactivate it remotely so that you can move the license to a new PC.

Can I pay with Alipay and Apple Pay?

Can I buy another maintenance period / 12 months of updates for the Perpetual License?

Yes, you will be able to do this! We have not yet added this ability to the website nor decided on the exact price. But the price will of course be lower than the perpetual plan and in line with how other companies does price this in the industry and we will add this ability in the near future to the website.

Technical Issues

How to set up and install Dash in a studio environment

If you want to install a trial or a paid license of Dash into a studio environment or a custom version of Unreal Engine, that is of course possible. Just send an email over to studios@polygonflow.io and we will give you instructions and the relevant files to achieve this.

Transferring a UE scene with Dash to another Computer

If you are gonna transfer your UE scene to another PC and want to be able to continue adjusting the Dash tools, you need to make sure to also move the associated JSON file that we create when you are using Dash.

What type of projects can Dash be used for?

Is Dash only available on Windows?

Yes. We're investigating Linux and MAC support, though it's hard to give any release estimates at this stage, since Unreal Engine also doesn't have great Linux/MAC support either, making it harder to port Dash there.

What are the system requirements?

The requirements for Dash are the same as Unreal Engine 5 but you also must have internet access and Windows 10 or 11. Dash doesn't work with Insider Preview versions of Windows.

What 3D software does Dash work with?

How do I uninstall Dash from UE5?

As of Dash 1.7, we are shipping an "Uninstall Dash" app within the Dash installation, so if you need to uninstall Dash, just search for "Uninstall Dash" in the Windows start bar and you should find the app.

How do I check if there exist an Dash update and install it?

Dash is affecting my performance

If you have used Dash in some way and the performance of your scene is getting bad, the most likely reason is that you have scattered to many assets for your PC to be able to handle this. The easiest solution is to try to decrease scatter density and/or delete the scattering to see if that makes any difference. But if you need the results you have created you can also try scattering batches of grass instead of scattering individual grass pieces, for example. You can always use the Merge Actors action in Dash to merge a few trees for example and then scatter that newly created Static Mesh instead.

How do I adjust the UI scale in Dash?

If Dash is too small or too big you can open Preferences from the main Dash menu, located on the left of the Dash bar. In there, you will find a setting for UI Scale Profile. You have to restart UE for the effects to take place.

Can I download previous versions of Dash?

Features & Tools

Will the tools affect performance?

What assets libraries are supported?

Dash has a content browser which supports PolyHaven, Megascans (download assets in the Bridge Plugin, and they'll show up. Download atlases in the Bridge standalone, and they'll show up), an IES Library, support for browsing & AI tagging your own content, and even browsing content from other projects in the one you're currently in.

Can I use my own OpenAI API key for AI tagging?

Yes you can! Open the Dash Content Browser, then switch the dropdown at the top to Current Project to ensure that we see the content of your current project.

Click on the three dots icons on the right, then select Insert Custom OpenAI Key. A popup will show up asking you to insert the key. Do it, then you're all set! Tagging limits will no longer apply, and the cost of tagging will from then on be on your end.

For some perspective, our napkin math shows us that tagging 2000 assets costs between $1.0 and $1.5 USD. We're actively adjusting our internal logic to improve quality and reduce costs, but that's where it stands right now.

Can I change the OpenAI Proxy URL?

Yes, you can! In the main Dash menu, you will find the Preferences panel, in there under Base Settings is the place to set your custom OpenAI Proxy URL.

Can I add my texture to the Dash Content Browser?

Yes by following these steps, Open the Dash Content Library and go the the project library tab, then expand the folder hierarchy on the left with the folder icon. Then you can right click on the top folder or any of the sub-folders and choose it the materials from said folder should be included or not. The reason we are excluding them as default is that it is not very useful to tag them with our AI tagging and thus that would only waste your monthly AI tags.

How do I use Dash’s color grading feature with an image?

First, make sure to create a Dash camera by searching for Camera in Dash and then make sure you are looking through it. Then you can drag any image and drop it on the Dash bar and we will extract the grading from that image to your Dash Camera.

Can I add and adjust Displacement through Dash?

Yes you can! This goes for the Megascans materials for UE 5.3 and 5.4 you use from the Dash Content Library. It is both possible through the Dash Material Edit tool and also the Dash Blend Material Tool. For it to work there are a couple of things you need to do:

The mesh you are applying the material on, has to be a static mesh, so if you have a Dash terrain or any other mesh from Dash that uses our custom mesh, you need to convert it to static. You can do this by searching for "static mesh" in Dash of course!
The mesh also needs to have enough resolution/triangles. You can create a dense plane through the Dash menu: Create - Mesh Primitives - Create Plane.
The mesh you are applying the material on has to have nanite enabled. You can search for "Actor Enable Nanite" in Dash to enable it on your selected mesh.
Also make sure that nanite tessellation is enabled in UE5. You can do that by running "enable nanite tessellation" command in the Dash prompt bar, if you haven't enabled it already.
You might also need to delete the material from the UE Content Browser so that Dash can re-import it when you drag it onto your surface.

What is the difference between Object Mask and Proximity Mask?

In some scenarios you might not get good enough results with proximity mask, then you could try the Object Masking feature instead.

Object Masking uses raycasting, and allows you to even remove stuff that's inside the barrel, for example. This results in much better proximity accuracy.

Proximity Masking is point-based and will rely on all the vertices of your barrel to keep the closest plants to them. It has no "interior" awareness or anything of the sort. It's much, much faster, ofc.

What material adjustments can I make with Dash?

With Dash, we give you the ability to adjust the materials if you are using materials from Megascans or Poly Haven. You can either do this by assigning one material and then opening Material Edit, or by assigning 2-3 materials and using our Blend Material. Besides the blending capabilities you get more or less the same settings on both the Material Edit tool and the Blend Material Tool. You can adjust the color of the material with the normal sliders, hue, saturation etc, you can adjust tiling, Normals, Displacement etc but there is more! You can also add atmospheric effects to the materials, this includes, Rain, Snow, Dirt, and Wind.

FYI, the Material Edit tool does not work on landscapes just yet. We hope to add this support in the future.

How to add variation to the material color of my scattered meshes?

If you want to have some variation in the colors of your scattered foliage you can easily achieve this with Dash in two steps.

Search for Instance Variation in Dash, assign your scatter instance, enable it, and choose a value for the Noise Scale.

Open the Material Edit for the scattered foliage, scroll all the way down, enable color variation, and play with the values, Hue, Saturation, and Brightness.

If this does not work for you, it could be the case that we don't support Color Variation on that specific asset. In general, we support it on most Foliage meshes from Megascans.

How to scatter dense grass on a big surface?

To scatter dense grass on a large surface, follow these steps:

Start by creating a plane to serve as your ground. You can do this by going to Dash Bar > Create > Mesh Primitives > Create Plane.
Open the Dash Content Browser, find your grass, CTRL drag and drop it onto your plane, and select Scatter Here.
Adjust the Density, Min Scale, and Max Scale parameters to achieve the desired density and size of the scattered grass.

If you are scattering on a really big surface, you might need to experiment with these settings as well

Density Mode: Change this to Global instead of Relative
Density: Once in the Global Density Mode, you can and probably need to increase the density above 1.
Max Count: If you have increased the density but don’t get any more grass, you need to increase the Max Count parameter under the Misc Settings in Surface Scatter.

Feel free to experiment with the settings to get the exact look you want! Enjoy your creative process! 🎉

Common Issues

My problem is not listed / Dash does not work

How can I edit an existing tool?

You can always re-open an existing tool in Dash and keep editing it as long as you haven't baked it or broken the tool connection. To open an existing tool in the Tools Panel and keep editing it you can follow one of two ways: 1. Open the tools panel by clicking the Edit icon in the Dash bar and then select your existing tool in the viewport or in the outlier, this will open the selected tool in the Tool Panel. Remember to make sure another tool is not pinned in the tools panel already. 2. Open the tools panel by clicking the Edit icon in the Dash bar and then in the top left corner of the Tools Panel you will see a menu icon with 3 lines. This opens the list of active tools which you can navigate between.

Important Notes:

If you edit an existing tool in the tools panel but don't see any changes happening in the viewport, maybe you are not adjusting the settings within the right tool (you can have several Surface Scatters for example), or maybe the tool connection has been broken. For example, in Surface Scatter make sure both the surface and the objects are still assigned at the top of the tool. In the Road Tool, make sure that the curve is still assigned at the top of the tool. Similar logic goes for other tools, they must have their basic assigned for the tools to work.
If you don't manage to open the tool with either of the ways explained above, the tool connection is completely gone, meaning you have to start over if you want to further adjust your results. This can happen if you; bake the tool, delete the tool, or delete any references to the tool, such as the original Scatter Object or Surface used in Surface Scatter. The references are important and must remain in your level.

There are no Megascans assets visible

If the Megascans view in the Content Library is empty for you even though you have assets downloaded from UE-Bridge, the most probable reason for this is that the Content Library couldn't locate where you downloaded your Bridge assets.

To solve this you need to find the UAsset folder, you can do this by going to Bridge, right-clicking on one downloaded asset, and choosing “Go to files”, there you can copy the path to the UAsset folder.

Then you need to open the Dash Preferences through the main Dash menu and go to the path section and click the paper clip icon and then paste in the path you copied from Bridge. If you have the same problem with Atlases from the standalone bridge you can follow the same procedure but copy the path from the standalone Bridge.

Poly Haven Issues

If the thumbnails of Poly Haven are not loading and/or you are not able to download the assets please try this:

Close unreal
Delete this folder c:\Users \ "USERNAME"\Documents\PolygonFlow\ContentLibrary\PolyHaven
Open unreal and start Dash + Content Browser
Go to Polyhaven library menu (3 vertical dots) and click Redownload library data, once view is populated try to download

I've downloaded assets in Bridge, but they're not visible in Dash

If you've downloaded assets in the Bridge UE plugin, and Dash's Content Browser still doesn't show them, try to switch libraries through the dropdown at the top-right corner of the Content Browser, then back to Megascans, and see if it fixes it. If it doesn't restart UE, and that should fix it.

If you've downloaded assets in the Bridge standalone software, then only atlases will show up, as we only support those assets through the standalone. Like with the plugin, a restart might be needed in case you still can't see the atlases.

Clicking the Dash icon does not work

There could be many reasons but one thing you could try is to add Unreal Engine and Dash as allowed apps in the Windows Defender, Controlled Folder Access.

Another thing you could try is uninstalling Dash and installing it with Admin Rights.

And a third idea is closing all instances of Unreal (through task manager) and then going to: c:\Users\[USERNAME]\Polygonflow\Dash\Plugins\UnrealEngineContext\resources\plugin\ and opening your UE folder and copy this folder “GraphNUnrealPlugin”.

Then you need to find your UE installation folder and go into this path: [UNREAL_ENGINE_INSTALLATION_FOLDER]/Engine/Plugins/Marketplace and paste the copied folder into the Marketplace folder, overwriting the existing one if one already exists.

There is no Dash icon in Unreal Engine or the installer got stuck on Installing…

Continue and finish the installation by clicking Next
Go to the Dash installation folder, the default is C:\Users\USER\Appdata\Local\Programs\Polygonflow\Dash\ Inside of that continue to Plugins\UnrealEngineContext\resources\plugin
Inside here you should see a folder corresponding to your Unreal Engine version, e.g. UE_5.3
Copy the GraphNUnrealPlugin folder from inside the version you want Dash installed into. Paste this folder into your engine plugins folder. e.g. C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.2\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace
The resulting path to GraphNUnrealPlugin folder should be C:\Program Files\Epic Games\UE_5.2\Engine\Plugins\Marketplace\GraphNUnrealPlugin\GraphNUnrealPlugin
Restart your UE and you should then be able to find the Dash icon as expected.

There were no UE versions found during my installation

If this happens you need to check the checkbox for your UE version and then click the browse button and then navigate to where you have UE installed, i.e. a folder called UE_5.1 or UE_5.3, etc. Then just select the folder and continue the installation. Hopefully you will then see a success message for the UE version you choose to install Dash in.

My trial or paid license can't be activated in the License Manager

If you can't request a trial license or activate a paid license in the Dash license manager there could exist several reasons and usually you will see an error code.

If you get "unknown authorization method'" or the activation simply does not work, you could try the following:
1. The time fix above!
2. Close Unreal, run cmd.exe as admin and then run 'winmgmt /resetrepository' command

My scatter result is not longer visible or the tool can't be opened

Some Dash panels are not visible or I can't see the assets in the Content Library

I have LOD/Culling Problems

If you have LOD or Culling problems or simply the scatters not showing correctly there are a few things you could try:

If you have nanite objects with masked materials and they are culled then you can lower Opacity Mask Clip Value for each material.
UE Console Commands for non-nanite meshes:
1. foliage.MaxTrianglesToRender 200000000 (This is a heavy one and the default value is 100 million, so increase gradually)
2. r.ForceLOD 0
3. foliage.forceLOD 0
4. r.RayTracing.Geometry.InstancedStaticMeshes.Culling 0 (Maybe only useful in Path Tracer)
5. foliage.LODDistanceScale 5 (or another number, maybe only useful in Path Tracer)
Keep in mind that commands like this could affect performance.
If you experience culling in huge World Partitioning Scenes you have to use the converter in Dash, “Convert Instances to Foliage”. This will break the tool connection so you can’t adjust the scatter anymore with Dash, but you will be able to use the UE Foliage Painter tools to further adjust it.

Curve Tool draws in the sky / floating splines

If you try to draw a curve/spline using our Draw Curve tool and the curve ends up floating or in the sky. The most likely reason is that the tool detects something above your surface. It could be some actors with colliders that are intercepted by our curve tool. (Assets, World Volumes, etc) You can try hiding things in the UE outlier to figure out what is causing the problem.

Nothing is happening when I use CTRL drag and drop from the Content Browser

If you try to use Scatter Here, Create Blend Material, etc through the CTRL drag and drop menu from the Dash Content Browser and nothing is happening. The most likely reason is that the tool detects something above your surface. It could be some actors with colliders that are intercepting the surface. (Assets, World Volumes, Procedural Foliage Spawner Volumes etc) You can try hiding things in the UE outlier to figure out what is causing the problem.

My objects from Physics Drop or Physics Paint is floating

You probably need to set the surface/object to Complex in the Dash physics settings. As of Dash 1.8.3, this setting is only visible in the Physics Drop tool, but we will add it in a future version directly to the Physics Paint tool as well. But right now if you change that collision setting in Physics Drop, it is saved to the Physics Paint as well.

HOW IT WORKS

Scatter Masking Features

Scattering is the most used feature of Dash, and its masking capabilities is why. Let's dig into them!

Dash contains various scatter tools, each tailored towards specific purposes. Most tools have very basic masking capabilities, and Surface Scatter is the one with pretty much all features outlined in this page.

Surface Scatter is a world-class scattering solution that operates on your mesh surfaces. The idea is to give it some geometry (static mesh, landscape, procedural mesh, etc...) as your surface/ground to scatter on, and some actors you want to scatter, and it'll do its magic.

This is the most extensive tool in Dash, and contains features requested from various major AAA studios, talented individual artists, and our team's relentless pursuit of state of the art world building.

Unlike Surface Scatter, Path Scatter only scatters along curves. You can give it a mesh, and if it has borders, it'll scatter along them by internally processing the borders as curves.

Decal Scatter does exactly what it says: Give it some surface to scatter on, and some decals to scatter, and your surface will be covered with decals.

Grid Scatter is a practical tool for more uniform patterns creation. You have full control over the XYZ dimensions & divisions, and basic proximity masking features.

Volume Scatter helps you fill any mesh with the instances of another mesh. Unlike Surface Scatter, this tool doesn't scatter on meshes, but inside them. A common use case is creating unique shapes like asteroid belts, or really any floating meshes you want in your scene.

Radial Scatter allows you to create rings of instanced meshes along an origin. You can then create rows of them, adjust its concentric properties to ensure that they add up nicely on each ring, use proximity/object masking, etc...

Masking Features

Dash's scattering tools contain various masking features, and while most of them reside in Surface Scatter only, the other tools still have a few, and we're actively expanding masking features to them. Let's look into all the major masking features, how they work, and what you can do with them.

Before we dig in, "masking" here means removing scattered instances. Additionally, most masking groups give you the ability to invert the mask result. You'll notice that some properties have a small dark circle on their bottom right corner, which means you can right-click on the property and select Invert Mask.

Proximity Masking

This feature allows you to mask by curve, meshes, and instances.

It has as Distance property which controls the proximity distance, and relies on the native UE units. The other property is Sampling. This value controls the quality of the masking. A higher value means higher quality, and lower value means lower.

In the example above, we're using meshes and curves for masking, but relying on instances is just as easy: Select them in the viewport, and add them to the proximity objects. In the example below, we've scattered some spheres, then scattered some discs, and only kept the disks near the spheres.

You can leverage proximity masking to build realistic forests. First you'd scatter trees, then keep the some ferns & leaves below them, then use a curve as a proximity mask in case you need a path, then scatter some rocks on the edges of that path, etc... In Surface Scatter, we provide three proximity mask groups, each having its own object, distance and sampling values. You could for example use the first group to mask out some objects with a specific distance, and do the same with the other two groups.

Lastly, Proximity Masking lends itself quite well to mask inversion.

Angle Masking

Angle masking is fairly straightforward: It relies on the underlying surface to determine the angle, and remove any scattered objects in that area. This is ideal for keeping slopes clear of trees and other objects when scattering on mountains.

Height Masking

Tools like Surface Scatter have Min Height Mask and Max Height Mask properties, which allow you to clip the scattered objects from above or below.

Object Masking

Unlike proximity masking, which simply relies on distances, Object Masking uses raytracing to determine when your instances are inside, outside or near an object. If you want to draw a curve, and keep all your instances inside that curve, this feature is perfect. You can also use it to keep instances that are inside/outside a mesh or volume.

This masking method also has a Keep Inside boolean property, which you can toggle to ensure that the masking either keeps instances inside, or outside of your input objects. You can also use the Distance property to keep instances nearby.

Noise Masking

Noise Masking allows you to quickly break up the uniformity of your scattered objects. You're provided a wide range of parameters, from scaling to frequency, axis-specific stretching, noise smoothing, warping, etc...

If you're scattering grass, trees or even trash, we highly recommend using this feature to make your results look more natural.

Clump Masking

Clump Masking works by picking random instances, and using them as the center point of a clump. You're provided with a value to adjust the density of instances to sample, and another to control the radius of your clumps. Combined with noise & other masks, this can be a very powerful tool for realistic scatter setups.

Border Masking

Border Masking detects the border edges of your surface geometry, and masks out all objects near those borders.

This feature really useful for man-made scatter setups like gardens, where you could make some underlying geometry shape, scatter some plants on it, then hide that geometry. Each edge loop border on your geometry is treated separately, and the Border Min/Max properties allow you to add some randomization to the masking for each border loop. Noise is a simple noise effect to break up the border's uniformity.

Projection Masking

Projection masking works by having the point of each instance shoot a ray upwards, and any mesh it hits that you've added to it will ensure that ray hit instances are kept. You can also invert the effect. Use cases range from keeping instances that are under objects, like plants or trash under a car, to removing all instances that are below any set of objects in your scene.

Landscape Layer Masking

This masking feature allows you to feed the name of a paint layer to Surface Scatter, and the tool then uses the layer as mask. You can feed up to three layers.

Texture Masking

Texture Masking is fairly straightforward: Select a texture in UE's content browser, feed it to the Texture Path property in the Texture Masking group, and voilà. You can pick which channel to use as a mask, adjust the color threshold to help with gradient pixels, and tile the texture mask. All you have to do is make sure that your texture contains white on black pixels, and the white pixels will be used as mask. If you're trying to create structure like small, decorated garden with very specific shapes, we recommend this approach where you could scatter on a plane, hide the plane, then give it the texture which represents the shape of your flowers garden.

Vertex Color Masking

Vertex colors can be applied on static meshes, and then all RGB channels are available in this masking group. Additionally, you have some pixel threshold control to adjust how the masking behaves on gradient pixels, and also a Blend Modes dropdown from which you can pick how the vertex color affects your masking logic.

Directional Masking

Unlike Angle Masking, Directional Masking allows you to use your sunlight (or any object) actor to mask out objects based on the sun's rotation. This can be used to remove objects that are sensitive to sunlight, with moss being the most common use case.

Add / Remove Masking

This is a simple masking trick that allows us to add or remove instances randomly. You could for example use proximity masking to clear a path from plants, but then use add mask at a low value to keep a few plants popping here and there.

Property References

When creating a complex setup, like say a forest with a Surface Scatter for the trees, another for the shrubs, another for the grass, etc... then a Path Scatter for some wooden posts along the forest, and a road, etc... That complexity can quickly become overwhelming, and we use references to make sense of this. Your road will have a width, and you'll want the wooden posts to respect that width, even if they have a slight offset. Same with the forest vegetation, you'll want it to not spawn on the road, and so on.

Centralized Asset Browser

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.

Part 1: Tagging Your Assets - Making Them Searchable

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 Project Library 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 and blueprints 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. From Dash 1.9.0 and onwards we do compute materials by default as well. But you can right click on an folder and exclude them

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.

Part 2: Centralized Asset Browser

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 view for Project 1 or any other UE project where you have computed assets, you need to link the paths. --> In the Project Library tab within the Content Browser, open the menu on the right and select Manage Project Libraries. 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. Manually or automatically with a search button.

Pro Tips:

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 "Metadata Path" to any local or cloud location. From Dash 1.9.0, the default metadata path is directly within your Unreal project, so then you don't have to worry about sharing the metadata cache, it is always included when you share the Unreal projects.

FAQ

How do I show the asset names?

If you click on the Content Browser's menu (dots icon, top right corner of the content browser), there's an option to view asset names.

Can I view the asset's details before importing it?

Yes, if you click on the Content Browser's menu (dots icon, top right corner of the content browser), there's an option to view asset details. Once it's enabled, selecting any given asset will show the you following properties about it:

Texture resolution.
Triangle count.
Asset scale. This is represented by a square with a character for reference, and hovering over that scale will display the width x height x depth scale.

Can I make the thumbnails bigger?

Yes, hold CTRL with your mouse over the Content Browser's view, then use the scroll wheel to scale the thumbnails up or down.

Can I view the triangle count of an asset before importing it?

How to use the Favorites feature?

Can I edit an asset's tags?

Yes, right-click on the asset, then select Asset Details, or double click on an asset and a panel will open up, showing all the asset's details, including a list of tags it has.

Can I add or remove tags to multiple assets at once?

I can't seem to get the CTRL + Drop right to scatter from the Content Browser

Do I need the Content Browser to scatter assets?

How to scatter along a curve when drag & dropping from the Content Browser?

Select the curve in the viewport, and with your asset selected, hold CTRL and drag and drop the asset onto the viewport. In the popup menu, pick Scatter on Selection.

Advanced

Release Notes

Dash Tools

Content Browser

The "Content" button on the Dash bar opens the Content Browser. Why use this instead of UE's native content browser?

Dash is rich with lots of tools that rely on content, and making it easy to blend the content & the tools is a top priority for us. For example, you should be able to just drag a plant from our Content Browser onto the viewport, then hold CTRL+Release your mouse, and scatter it, or make vines out of it, or scatter it along a spline in case it's a lamp post, etc...
People often have content they built, content from Megascans, Dekogon, Sierra Division, PolyHaven, some free asset pack of the month, etc... We've built dedicated features for Megascans & PolyHaven, and are actively working to extend support for more content creators/libraries. This means better/faster interaction with those libraries.
Your own content can be hard to sift through, and we've integrated a world-class AI tagging solution to make all your objects easy to find.
We've also made it possible to browse & import all content from all your projects inside the one you're current working with!
Later in the year (2025), you'll be able to not just browse local but also free or paid content, and purchase it right from this panel. This will make content acquisition an afterthought, as you no longer have to go through the UE Marketplace, or Gumroad, or any of the billion other variants that sell content packs. Just type "barrel", see the one you like, buy it for a few bucks, and that's it.