Autodesk Mudbox 2013 SDK Documentation > About the Mudbox SDK >

# 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.

#### See Also

- Writing Plug-ins