Feedback from 3 days of use (v 1.88 / UE 5.5.1)
Hello! Here’s my feedback after experimenting with Dash this week, version 1.88 on UE 5.5.1 . Please mind that I might have not dig enough in certain functions, or I followed outdated tutorials from Youtube and many features disappeared/changed in the tool panel. :
There are definitely some super cool features and a huge time saver for certain tasks, particularly:
- Placing/repeating props and meshes,
- Drawing roads with a single mouse swipe,
- Creating a mini landscape mesh in just a few clicks,
- Generating mesh surfaces using the lasso tool in five seconds,
- Scattering assets using height and masks to hide unwanted areas,
- Curve, draw, and road tools, as well as climbing plants,
- Shortcuts (e.g., tweaking very simple materials),
- The water tool, which lets you create a plane with a water material in two clicks (although the material itself is limited in customization),
- The cable tool, which is super practical,
- Scattering tools overall work well,
- Placing objects with physics in two clicks is just chef’s kiss.
- The AI assistant seems really good but it got me lot of outdated and wrong answers of things that are not possible to do.
On the downside:
- A lot of crashes, especially during both manual and automatic saves (leading to wasted work time),
- CTRL+Z doesn’t work, so even though Dash is mostly non-destructive, you often have to delete and redo everything from scratch if something goes wrong,
- The non-destructive workflow can sometimes become unmodifiable, forcing you to delete and recreate elements,
- Roads are still very limited: no intersections, and they’re either super thick to adapt to the landscape’s shapes or they stick to the mesh and end up looking like melted cheese,
- Material tools are extremely limited: material blending options are scarce, no vertex painting on Nanite, no easy-to-use vertex colors, and many features don’t work as shown in their tutorials,
- Material tools are restricted to Quixel and Polyhaven, and manually imported materials don’t work with Dash.
In summary:
- Personally, if it were free, I think it would be an excellent complementary tool for saving time on tasks it currently handles well.
However, since it’s a paid tool, I don’t find it powerful enough to replace a Blender–Unreal workflow. You do save time on some meshes and environment elements, but the bugs and limitations are concerning. I feel like the price tag right now is way too high, especially for just 12 month update. I sincerely think Dash would really benefit having a essentials functions free version.
Let’s see how the pricing and future updates turn out.
P.S.: I have no idea about the performance impact of all these non-destructive tools.
Hope it helps, thank you for working to make UE more practical and intuitive, and thank you for fast answers in the support, really appreciate it !
1 Reply
Thanks for all of this feedback!
Will read through this carefully when I have some time👏 👏
Hey!
First off, many thanks for taking the time to write this long and detailed message! I will try and cover some of the points
* Yee the AI assistant needs updated context sometimes which we do in each new Dash release so sometimes it is a bit behind on certain areas.
* Regarding crashes with automatic saves, did this happen when autosaved happend at the same time you were adjusting the tools? We have seen some reports of that. If not, can you please share some more details? And also, getting the crash log, and the crash files for such crashes would be really great so we can dig into it!
* Yee as our UI is on top of UE, CTRL Z / undo is a bit finnicky sadly
* When you say it becomes onmodifiable sometimes, what do you mean exactly? Examples and videos would be great!
* 100% agree, it is a very basic tool right now, but it will for sure get some love later this year!
* Vertex painting on Nanite I think is a UE limitation.
* Yee we don't have our own vertex paint tool, what would you say is the most problematic aspect of this in the UE way? Maybe it is something we can and should look into
* What material tool features don't work as shown in the videos? We would never show something "fake", so you are probably experiencing some bug that we can help you solve!
* Yee materials tools only support MS and PH and that's because they have a known structure. Fixing support for any materials would be really hard as all materials out there have different structures sadly. But it is something we want to do eventually!
* Thanks for the pricing/free suggestion, we would definitely love to offer much of Dash free, but for the time being we have to keep it paid in order to support our continuous development. If we can go back and forth a bit on the bugs you have experienced, maybe I can adjust your thinking about the value of Dash! 🙌