General Feedback
My trial period for Dash is about to expire and I'm struggling to find a good reason to buy a license. I'm having so many problems with this tool that it's hard to pick one that is worse than the others. But probably the worst in my opinion is the lack of good quality documentation to help understand how these features work. There are pages, for example, just blank with no information. I tried the AI tool, but it lacks specifics and it took me six questions to get an answer to what I thought was a simple question.
Here is just one example. I wanted to use the Physics Paint tool to drop a number of utensils on a rather complex table object. But I never figured out how to do it. The first problem was that it would drop the utensils at the very top of the table. I figured it was using the simple collision, so I reset the table's collision to use complex collision for simple. That didn't help. I tried different settings and nothing helped. It kept dropping utensils and they would stop way above the table.
So I replaced the table with a simple box thinking that would do the trick. I set the scale and position of the box to match the table top and deleted the table. My next problem was that I couldn't get the brush to change size. I changed the default 1.5 down to 0.2, and in the display area the sphere shrank accordingly. But when I went to paint, it would paint at the large 1.5 size. Changing the brush size had NO effect on the painting.
I thought, okay, I'll just paint all over the place and then delete the created utensils that fall on the floor. But when I changed the brush from "Paint" to "Erase" IT KEPT PAINTING more utensils. I could NOT get it to stop painting. I tried the push and pull option. Nothing changed the painting. It was like the tool was stuck on default and changing any of the parameters had no effect.
I looked through the documentation and looked through the few YouTube videos that covered painting. But nothing helped.
Not likely renewing.
5 Replies
Hey @jdhart., sorry to hear you are experiencing many issues, I will try to address them all!
1. Yes, our documentation page is very WIP, a few of the first pages are pretty good, but there exists some very basic ones and some have not even been written yet yes. We are working on it continuously though, so it will get better and better. We have been focusing more on making good tutorials for YouTube where we cover how Dash works, so if you haven't checked some of those, you should🙌
2. The AI assistant works great for some questions and really bad for others yes, and as it is trained on our docs, that's the reason😕
3. When you tried to change the collision settings, did you try the collision settings in Dash Physics? Those are the ones you need to change if you get bad collision. More info here: https://discord.com/channels/826908885024636989/1154397483041042442/1310878988083793941
4. Yep, the fact that changing settings in the Physics Paint only works the first time in a new UE5 session is a known bug, and it is fixed in the upcoming Dash 1.8.5, and Dash 1.8.5 beta 🙌
So in conclusion, I totally understand that you don't feel like continuing to test Dash. And as the physics bug seems to have been one of the biggest problems for you, I would like to reset your trial, give you the 1.8.5 beta when we ship the next version and then you can hopefully have at least a less buggy Physics experience! Let me know if you are interested or not!
And if you have more problems we can tackle them one by one then! We are a small team with a new software so unfortunately there exist bugs, but we try hard to give good support and help here in Discord until we have fixed any such bugs!🙌
Hi Daniel. First, sorry for the frustration in my message. I was at wits end over the tool.
The truth is that I like the possibilities of what it can do, so that only frustrates me more. 🙂
Since I was about to throw in the towel, I ended up removing the plugin and then reinstalling it, and for now, that seems to have helped with the Physics Paint issue I was having. I was able to get the brush size to adjust, etc. and it worked fine.
I haven't had time to check out the other features now that I reinstalled it, but would like to. If you are up for it, I'd like to take you up on your offer to reset my trial and give me another month. I'll also make sure I'm working with 1.8.5 when it comes out.
As for the other problems, would it be okay if I just attached comments to this thread? One problem I was having is that the Dash tool bars (whenever I had them open) would just disappear behind my view windows. I would have to keep minimizing the window to get access to the bar.
There were others, but as I said, I'll start using the tool again next week to see if reinstalling it helped with those other items.
Thanks.
Don't worry about it, I can understand the frustration when software ain't working but you really want it to work.
Ah okay that's good that the physics paint works now at least!
Sounds like a good plan, feel free to send over any problems here, the more details the better, including videos/pictures. And depending on the problem, having the output log open in the pics/videos is always a good idea. I think I found your license and have now made the reset to it. You can either grab Dash 1.8.3 (https://www.polygonflow.io/download-latest-dash) or 1.8.5 beta (https://polygonflow.io/download-latest-beta), we hope to ship 1.8.5 officially before Christmas fyi
I have experienced that a few times, but very rarely so have not been able to figure out what is causing the hiding panels. If you keep experiencing it, please send over:
1. a picture of your UE layout, showing what sections you have open etc, and if you are using UE on multiple displays
2. What Dash UI scale you have in the Dash preferences
3. Your windows zoom level and screen resolution
Hopefully we can together figure out all issues and let you have a better experience this time!
Your responsiveness is very encouraging, which, for someone with 40 years in the software engineering field, is refreshing and rare these days, and will definitely influence my decision on acquiring the tool.
As for the toolbars jumping behind the UE5 windows, I noticed it happened most often when I was using both screens.
I'll post screenshots (or videos) when/as I experience issues with enough detail to hopefully reproduce the problems. I'm hoping that reinstalling the plugin will remedy some of the bigger problems.
Many thanks for your feedback!
hehe glad to hear it! I am no developer or UE artist myself, but as I have been helping users now since we launched Dash, I think I often can give pretty good help at least 😄
Alright, that sounds like a good idea!
Fyi, back in Dash 1.8.1 and before, we had consistent problems when people had more than 1 screen, this was solved in Dash 1.8.2 and then it is important that the Dash UI scale is set to 100%, so it is worth checking that scale and make sure you are on Dash 1.8.2 or 1.8.3. But we have gotten at least one report of problems when using the Load Layout feature in UE and/or when your UE layout is one where you have some UE windows on one Screen and some on another screen