Some feedback
hello! so after using dash for the first time on the "fungal jungle" project, i have a couple things that i have been thinking about. one is that it seems when you close the surface scatter window or close down the engine, the plugin no longer recognizes the scatter actors as its own. so if you want to alter them subsequently, you cannot, you'd have to start anew. and continuing with the scatter stuff, it would be really great to be able to make prefabs or even something more parametric like blueprints using the surface scatter tool. for example in my scene, i scattered moss on trees, and it would be great to have that then become a new actor i can place in the scene for some future thing.
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Hey!
hi! also i did read there will be some more robust landscape related stuff. the only thing that was a little annoying was the river, when i realized the spline tool was useless to me in that situation.
that is 10/10 the best spline tool i've ever used tho, it's how it should have been from the beginning
Thanks, let's walk through each point at a time,
That should definitely not be the case,
1. did this happen all the time?
2. If you selected your scattered results, did you not see any quick setting icon in Dash? (that is used to open it back up) Or did nothing happen when you clicked on it?
i did not see anything, no, but it's possible that i missed it. it also created new scatter with overlapping names, so that led me to believe that it no longer considered the previous ones part of the plugin's purview.
i can open the project again and have a look, it hasn't gone into my "old" folder yet
Same names should not be an issue! Yes that would be great!
there also exist this command, "show tools" that opens a panel with all your "alive" tools in the scene, it can get a bit crammed and messy if you don't name stuff properly.
okay i actually did miss the icon, i think one of the issues is that a lot of UI that's just icons is something at least i will often look over, and the old scatter actors do not appear in the "surface scatter" window under the list at the upper left. that list only seems to be populated by the ones you've done while that window is open
and actually the icon isn't appearing for every actor
ah, that is true, let me record a short video showing how it should work
okay, i think i know why this is happening tho. i didn't realize that if i deleted the original static meshes that i tell the scatter tool to scatter, those would also disappear from the scatter tool. i think it would be better having you pick those from the content drawer than in the level. or at least i could not figure out how to do the former.
so the earliest iterations of the scatter i did had some "parts" deleted, i think, from the level, if that makes sense
ah yes that is true, you can't delete them, for now they must exist in the outlier unfortunately
yeah i assume they have to become "actors" for it to work. but it isn't very intuitive that you'd have to do this, so i broke it a couple times before i figured it out.
that's really great feedback!
it looks like if you click on the icon in the main part of the UI to access the settings of the scatter, you can then reopen the surface scatter window, and then it can tell you in the dropdown in the upper left all the scatters that were made at the time of the one you're modifying. that doesn't include the ones you do before having closed the window before, but it is at least more than one.
oh good i'm glad that's helpful
i had a little trouble trying to figure out the custom scale thing, too, because those big background mushroom tree things are at a scale of 3-4, and i wanted some to be thicker, but it seemed like the custom scale would not let me go beyond 1.0 for any dimension.
So here is a quick video showing this:
You can open a Surface Scatter tool and that be constist of one or several instances, that's the internal dropdown.
Then you can open another SS, and in there you can also have several instances.
So in the Active tool list, it will show you the Surface Scatters, but it wont show you how many instances may exist in each.
If you have many SS, with maybe many instances in each, I think it is best to just select a scatter result, click the tool icon up in Dash, and that gives you the quick settings, and if you need full settings, you can use the vertical dots on the right side of the quick settings
ah yes, i see, this makes sense
yes the custom scale is not a great feature, it is usually more helpful to use normal min and max scale, but that scales it in all axes ofc
the "Active tools" thing passed me by
yeah and there are some things that work pretty well distorted
and can add more variety, so that's what i was hoping to do
I completely understand that, we are not talking much about this more advanced workflow, as most people scatters stuff from our Content Library and just use the select result and click icon way.
yes that makes sense. i will say i haven't found your more in depth documetation if there is any. i am one of the few remaning people who seems to learn best from reading.
I will add "increase" max values of custom scale to our to-do list for sure!
Discord is more or less what we have right now, sadly, it is on our to-do list of course!
in that line of thought, i actually feel like i barely scratched the surface of what this can do, and one thing about the format of it is that without seeing a list of commands in the main UI, i know i am probably going to miss a lot of things
i dunno if this makes sense but i do not always know what i want to do when i start, sometimes it's something i just happen to see i could do easily and i will do that
(i am not professional by any means, blocking out scenes for example is totally foreign to me lol)
Makes total sense!
you can double click the dash logo to scroll through all our tools and action, that give you a basic idea of what we have.
well you sure can, that's very useful, thank you
and then when opening up the tools, right now the best way to explore is just going through each section, hovering over and reading what the little hint says
not great I know
But do you feel like you understood how you can continue editing stuff after you have closed it now? Happy to explain more if needed
yes i totally get it now
thank you
awesome, moving on then.
Prefabs, yes that would be great and it is on our list. There does exist one "hacky" way to do it already, it is by opening up the corresponding json file we have created with your level, it contains your tools and their settings. In theory you could copy that into another level. But not super nice way of working, let me know if you want me to explain how more detailed 🙂
well the other thing that you could do now is convert instances to static meshes, which actually is very useful, and then use the static mesh merger to create the new asset on one of them. not editable in the same way but it could work for certain things.
Yep! You saw we had a bake tool for that?
for the conversion I mean
yes, i used that to modify the position for a couple of the instances
Nice!
yes that was very helpful actually
We are planning on making it possible to move a single object of the scatter as well, to not needing to bake and remove the ability to change scatter settings
the scatter tool is realy very good, but in a lot of these cases i only had one version of any mesh and just a few places needed modification
oh yes that's good
and regarding this message " the only thing that was a little annoying was the river, when i realized the spline tool was useless to me in that situation."
what did you mean?
well unless i'm missing something, and i looked through the chats here and couldn't find anything, you cannot automate making the spline deform the terrain to put a river into the scene
so i projected the spline onto the terrain, converted to static mesh, and then went into the modeling tools and deformed it manually
using the spline as a guide
ah, now I think I understand what you mean, yes we do not have any deform tool and our Dash created terrains can't be adjusted based on a spline no
yeah that's what i had read on the server. it worked okay.
i mean what i ended up doing
Great to hear that! Will take a not of your case here as well.
With water I usually, create a terrain with some height, then create a plane, assign water to it, and try to find a nice plane to place it on the terrain, and then continue building my scene based on that
yes in this case i had a sort of concept of a meandering stream to help "close off" the scene because i always find it's the distance/background stuff that always gets you in the final images. so i did try messing around with the terrain like you said, but i didn't get quite the result i wanted.
I can understand that, not always easy and really though when you already have a concept you are working towards
yes, but i did read you had some plans, maybe distant, regarding more terrain customization, so i'm sure whatever that is will help with this kind of thing
Yep yep we do! That among much else we want to do 😄
do you have a roadmap anywhere? i'm curious about what else you plan to add
Nothing public yet, making that public is also on the to-do list.. hehe
right, gotcha, well, it is a very exciting tool. i was really very happy not to have to devote so much time to getting certain technical things going, as i said.
Happy to hear that! And great job with the scene, I would love to create one for my self (If I would ever find the time), I think showcasing the tools in such an environment, in one of our YouTube shorts would be really really cool
i appreciate your kind words, thank you. funnily enough i've been wanting to do this kind of scene for a long time, but there were always aspects of it that i knew would be kind of a pain, and so the tool made this very possible.
Thanks for the great chat, and feel free to post any questions you might have and art you create in the showcase channel👏
alright will do! thank you!
Hey @siuan I hope you are well.
I just wanted to let you know that your old feedback regarding max custom values, it is now possible to manually write values on almost all places to go over the default maximum when using the sliders. This "feature" came in Dash 1.2 which we released a little while ago 🙂
oh that's great! thank you for pinging me. i hope to be able to try it soon. just been busy lately and also don't currently have a super solid idea in my head.
No worries!
Understandable! Looking forward to seeing your next project, whenever it comes 🙂
thank you, i will definitely post it here!