Polygonflow's Dash Gets A Major Update With Unreal Engine 5.4 Support

Launched back in 2023, Dash is a world-building tool for Unreal Engine, designed to streamline and accelerate the process of creating digital 3D worlds in the engine with a wide array of toolsets and libraries.

Polygonflow calls Dash 1.7 a major release, introducing Unreal Engine 5.4 support and a bunch of new tools and significant improvements to existing features.

With the new Vines Creation Tool, the workflow for making vines from scratch is extremely simple: select a surface you want the vines to grow on, an actor to serve as your origin, and watch the magic happen.

Alternatively, download atlases from Megascans and drag and drop them from the Dash Content Browser onto an object, which will automatically convert the atlas texture to mesh cards and scatter them nicely like leaves on branches.

The AI tagging solution was revamped with GPT-4 to give you more accurate tags at a much faster rate. Right now, there's a cap on how many assets you can tag per month, and it's currently sitting at 800 per month for students, 2000 for professionals, and 10000 per month for studios. 

Another key feature of this release is a new Reference system that replaced the old variables system with control over properties from all your tools in a unified way, a workflow ideal for complex scenes.

Do you have a specific width for your path? Just create a reference property for that, and use it to drive the entire environment.

IES are small files that describe how light is distributed from a lamp. Luckily for us, there are websites like ieslibrary.com that share almost every IES profile you can think of, and now all of this is accessible right inside the Dash Content Browser.

Another simple, but useful feature is Image to Grading. Do you have an image with a grading you like? Just drag and drop it onto the Dash bar, and you'll get its grading. Works with local images and links.

By dragging and dropping three surfaces from the Dash Content Browser, you can now create a new blend material that uses height map, vertex color (for non-Nanite meshes), and noise as its blending options.

You also have full control over every single layer, from basic color controls to excluding certain texture maps and so on.

A highly requested feature, Landscape Layer Masking, is finally here and allows you to specify the name of a landscape paint layer in Surface Scatter and use it as a mask.

There are many more new features and improvements within Dash 1.7, including Fog Cards 2.0, Instance Color Variation 2.0, Volume Scatter tool, Multi Asset Tagging, Border Masking, and Curve Masking and Tool Presets improvements.

As Dash is slowly becoming an ecosystem of tools for all world-building tasks from asset placement to material authoring, camera setup, physics-based placement, vines, channel packing, atmospherics, and everything else, the team at Polygonflow has announced they'll be ready to share details on Dash 2.0 soon and encouraged everyone to join the Discord server where an initial beta will kick off this summer.

See the full list of Dash 1.7 updates in the release notes here and don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.