Kinds of Plug-ins

Mudbox provides direct support for the following kinds of plug-ins:

Mesh importers and exporters - See Mesh Importer and Exporter Plug-ins.
Viewport filters - See Viewport Filters.
Pickers - See Picking.
Materials - See Materials.
Mesh limit surface plug-ins - See Smoothing and Limit Surfaces.
Tangent space plug-ins - See the TangentGenerator class documentation.
Sculpting brushes - See Sculpting and Brushes.
Mesh division plug-ins - See Mesh Division.
Utility plug-ins - See Nodes.
Renderer - See Geometry Processing.
File event handlers - See Writing a File Event Handler Plug-in.

Miscellaneous Tasks

A utility plug-in is a catch-all category for other plug-in. A utility plug-in can derive directly from Node or a derived class. Some of the tasks that you may do with a utility plug-in include:

Associating custom data with nodes - See Attributes.
Mesh manipulation - See Mesh and Topology.
Control camera position and settings - See the Camera class documentation.
Move / scale / rotate geometry - See Transformations and Coordinate Space Conversions.
Read / write / create texture maps - See Textures.
Sample texture values - See Sampling Texture Values.
Change preferences programmatically - See Application-Level Functionality.
Data serialization - See Serializing Plug-in Data.
Menu customization - See Menu Customization.
Displaying messages - See Displaying Messages and Progress Notifications.