ADN Plugin of the Month Catalog
This page has 6 sections: AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, 3ds Max, Maya, and MotionBuilder. Within each section, the plugins are arranged from most current to earliest. Due to the use of .NET to develop these plugins, many of the 2012 versions need to be unblocked. See this blog posting for more information. Versions of these plugins that are compatible with 2013 products are available in the App Store which is accessible from inside the products.
AutoCAD
| Month | Plugin | Supported Applications |
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March 2012 |
Pipe2Pline for AutoCAD Civil 3D Pipe2Pline is a tool for AutoCAD Civil 3D that creates a 3D Polyline from a selected part of a Pipe Network. To do this it asks the user to select the starting and ending Pipe or Structure, then finds the shortest path between them.  |
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January 2012 |
Solid Cut Surface for AutoCAD Civil 3D This plug-in generates an AutoCAD Civil 3D TIN Surface below an AutoCAD solid element. |
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September 2011 |
TransTips for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3ds Max This plugin translates the contents of tooltips in various Autodesk products automatically into one of 35+ languages via the Bing online translation service. The translated text is stored in a local cache of XML files, which can also be edited and provided with the plugin, should someone wish to provide improved translations for certain tooltips. |
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February 2011 |
AveragePoint for AutoCAD This plugin determines the average of a number of selected points inside AutoCAD. The plugin registers a transparent command that can be called from within 2D and 3D modeling operations, inputting the calculated point directly to AutoCAD's command-line. |
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January 2011 |
DrawOrder by Layer for AutoCAD This plugin can be used to reorder AutoCAD objects by their layer. This is done by selecting the layer to reposition in the list, and pressing the move up or move down button to change its relative order. |
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December 2010 |
QR Codes for AutoCAD This plugin can be used embed QR Codes in AutoCAD drawings. QR Codes are 2-dimensional bar codes used to encode various types of data. One likely use of this tool is to encode data into drawings' title sheets for later decoding via a mobile device at a job site. |
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November 2010 |
ScriptPro 2.0 for AutoCAD ScriptPro 2.0 is a batch processing utility that applies a set of commands to multiple drawings. Simply specify a script file that contains the commands you want to run on a single drawing, and then use ScriptPro 2.0 to apply that script to as many drawings as you like. ScriptPro 2.0 handles opening and closing each drawing for you. ScriptPro 2.0 takes AutoCAD scripting to a new level with an easy-to-use interface, logging, reusable project files and robust error recovery so your processing continues even when AutoCAD can't. |
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October 2010 |
BrowsePhotosynth for AutoCAD BrowsePhotosynth allows you to browse the contents of Microsoft's Photosynth website and selectively import point clouds for chosen synths. It can therefore be used to generate 3D models from sets of 2D images. |
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September 2010 |
DigSigStamp for AutoCAD DigSigStamp allows the user to specify a BlockReference that changes its display when plotted to indicate whether the drawing had a valid digital signature at the time of plotting. |
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August 2010 |
RefUcsSpy for AutoCAD Many AutoCAD users have reference files set up in World coordinates. Attaching such files when in a different User Coordinate System (UCS) can result in the contents appearing at incorrect locations. This plugin can be used within AutoCAD to detect when reference files are being attached when the UCS is not "World." If it is not, the user will be prompted whether they would like to temporarily set the UCS to World for the duration of the attach command. |
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June 2010 |
DimensionPatrol for AutoCAD DimensionPatrol highlights dimensions in a drawing for which the user has customized the dimension text. These are dimensions that may not display the correct size of they entity they are attached to if the drawing is edited. Potentially errant dimensions are highlighted by drawing a colored rectangle behind the dimension. |
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May 2010 |
Spiro for AutoCAD This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to create Spirograph™-like patterns. Turn your AutoCAD-based application into an educational toy that will provide hours of fun for the whole family!
Spirograph is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. |
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April 2010 |
XrefStates for AutoCAD This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to manage the state of the various external references in the current drawing. It allows you to store "Xref States" - similar in nature to Layer States - which contain information on the various Xrefs in the drawing: whether each is loaded or unloaded. The Xref States get stored within the drawing and so can be used in future editing sessions. |
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March 2010 |
DWF/PDF Batch Publish for AutoCAD This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to simplify the process of publishing sets of drawings to DWF and/or PDF. It runs as a command within AutoCAD - as opposed to a separate executable - and uses a separate executable to monitor AutoCAD's health and restart it, as needed. The status of the batch publishing operation is stored to disk, allowing it to pick up from where it left off and also for any failed documents to be retried without starting from scratch. A setting is available to only publish drawings that have been modified since they were last published, making it easier to publish sets of documents on a regular basis. |
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January 2010 |
Facet Curve for AutoCAD This plugin can be used to facet 2D and 3D curves in AutoCAD, i.e., to approximate their curvature with a number of straight line segments. The faceted output is in the form of a number of lines or a single polyline, as selected by the user. |
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December 2009 |
Layer Reporter for AutoCAD This plugin can be used to generate a report of the layers used within an AutoCAD drawing. The report formatting can be customized to the needs of the user and these settings will be applied when the tool is used on other drawings, reducing the effort required to generate other such reports. |
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November 2009 |
Screenshot for AutoCAD This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to simplify the process of capturing images of parts of drawings, or the entire drawing or application window. It optionally allows you to remap the background to white and the foreground to black, convert the entire image to grayscale, as well as sending the captured image directly to a printer. |
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October 2009 |
Clipboard Manager for AutoCAD This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to manage multiple clipboard entries - storing and renaming them for later use. |
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September 2009 |
Offset in XREF This plugin can be used with AutoCAD to enable the OFFSET command to work with externally referenced drawings. The plugin enables the standard OFFSET to work with externally referenced content instead of responding with the "Cannot offset that object." message. |
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Inventor
| Month | Plugin | Supported Applications |
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April 2012 |
Material Profiler for Inventor This plugin is a design tool that allows users to visualize information concerning the various materials used inside an assembly. The materials from top level assembly to all of its sub-assemblies and their components are listed by the plug-in interface. |
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December 2011 |
Hierarchy Clone for Inventor This plugin can be used to copy and rename Inventor IAM/IDW/DWG file along with any files it references (including substitute parts and OLE references). |
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October 2011 |
Inventor LinkParameters The LinkParameters add-in allows Inventor users to easily create dependencies between parameters of various parts and sub-assemblies in the context of the top-level assembly in which they reside. Users are able to select visually a parameter from a source component and affect its value to a specific parameter in a target component. The add-in is based on the iLogic functionality introduced in Inventor 2011. It automatically generates the iLogic code required to link the values of the parameters, without the need for the user to write any iLogic instructions. |
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September 2011 |
TransTips for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3ds Max This plugin translates the contents of tooltips in various Autodesk products automatically into one of 35+ languages via the Bing online translation service. The translated text is stored in a local cache of XML files, which can also be edited and provided with the plugin, should someone wish to provide improved translations for certain tooltips. |
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July 2011 |
PointLinker for Inventor Inventor can import point data from an Excel file, but once the data has been imported, the link with the Excel file is not retained. If the user then updates the point data in the Excel file, the data must be manually re-imported and the associated model re-constructed. This is a time consuming and inefficient exercise. The Point Linker for Inventor tool allows Inventor users to import points from an Excel file, and retain a link to that file. Users can import data (as with the existing command), update with new data, or resolve to another Excel file. |
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May 2011 |
ThreadModeler for Inventor The ThreadModeler tool allows Inventor users to more easily create realistic modelized threads based on an existing Inventor thread feature. Users select an existing thread feature in the model and ThreadModeler generates a realistic thread based on the feature properties. |
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July 2010 |
FeatureMigrator for Inventor This plugin allows Inventor users to more easily create parts from assembly features. Through functionality provided by the tool, users are able to migrate (re-create) an existing assembly feature in the relevant sub-parts at the right location in the part space and with the same properties as the parent feature in the assembly. The FeatureMigrator can reliably migrate an assembly feature to the part level. This can save a lot of time and effort for the user when compared with the manual approach, i.e., creating the equivalent features in the affected parts. |
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February 2010 |
Screenshot for Inventor This plugin can be used with Inventor to simplify the process of capturing images of parts of documents, or the entire document or application window. It optionally allows you to remap the background to white and the foreground to black, convert the entire image to grayscale, as well as sending the captured image directly to a printer. |
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Revit
| Month | Plugin | Supported Applications | ||||||
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June 2012 |
Chamfer Fillet for Revit This plug-in can be used to create a chamfer or a fillet between two walls. The command allows you to select two walls and to specify distances along each wall from the intersection of two walls to create a chamfer and a radius for the fillet. The command then calculates the intersection, inserts the third wall representing a chamfer or a fillet, and adjusts the end points of the given walls. |
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May 2012 |
eStorage for Revit This add-in stores and manages the contents of external files in Revit extensible storage on selected elements in the BIM model. |
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February 2012 |
Level Generator for Revit Architecture Generate multiple adjacent levels with one command. |
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November 2011 |
Revit String Search Search Revit project elements and their parameter values for a given string. |
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September 2011 |
TransTips for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3ds Max This plugin translates the contents of tooltips in various Autodesk products automatically into one of 35+ languages via the Bing online translation service. The translated text is stored in a local cache of XML files, which can also be edited and provided with the plugin, should someone wish to provide improved translations for certain tooltips. |
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August 2011 |
Wall Opening Area for Revit This plugin calculates the sum of openings on each wall and stores the values in two shared parameters for each wall.
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June 2011 |
File Upgrader for Revit This plugin can be used to batch upgrade previous versions of Revit files to the Revit 2012 format. This utility tool is intended to help upgrade family contents. You can also use it to upgrade project files. |
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April 2011 |
ASHRAE Viewer for Revit MEP Revit MEP utilizes the American Society of Heating Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Duct Fitting Database to lookup coefficients for determining pressure losses through duct fittings. This add-in provides a way to view the illustrations and the data table of available duct fittings from the database. |
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March 2011 |
Room/DoorRenumbering for Revit This plugin can be used to renumber or re-assign the "Number" properties of rooms and spaces or the "Mark" property of doors and windows in the order that the user selects while avoiding duplicated assignments. The command allows the user to specify the starting number with the option of the prefix and suffix added. |
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3ds Max
| Month | Plugin | Supported Applications |
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March 2013 |
Sketchfab for 3ds Max This plug-in can be used to publish your models from 3ds Max and shown your 3d models directly on sketchfab. Sketchfab is an online platform for viewing 3d models directly in your browser. This is very convenient for communication with clients or presentations. |
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February 2013 |
ExplodeGeometry for 3ds Max This plug-in can be used to choose one or more nodes in a 3ds Max scene and create "exploded" geometry. The exploded geometry is actually 3 or 4 sided faces, and the plugin provides options to add modifiers to enhance the finished geometry to meet a variety of needs. |
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September 2011 |
TransTips for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit, and 3ds Max This plugin translates the contents of tooltips in various Autodesk products automatically into one of 35+ languages via the Bing online translation service. The translated text is stored in a local cache of XML files, which can also be edited and provided with the plugin, should someone wish to provide improved translations for certain tooltips. |
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Maya
| Month | Plugin | Supported Applications |
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November 2012 |
MASHNodes for Maya MASH is a suite of Maya nodes, developed in-house at Mainframe, aimed at enabling our artists to create versatile 'motion design' style animations. It offers a selection of effector nodes which can be daisy-chained together to generate a wide variety of customizable effects. It's fully controllable from both Maya's Attribute and Node Editors. |
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October 2012 |
LocatorLib for Maya This plug-in allows users to create different shapes of locators other than Maya's internal built-in locator. It provides a custom command, which has 5 built-in flags, allowing users to create 4 different basic types of locator, specifically an oval-shape locator, a square-shape locator, a cube-shape locator, and a sphere-shape locator. It also provides a custom locator with 2 functional modes for the custom: Shape mode — The user can define a simple shape (2d or 3d) as a continuous closed polyline. Solid mode — The user can define a simple solid as a series of triangles. |
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August 2012 |
Math Node for Maya This plug-in can be used in place of the Maya Expression system. Maya's evaluation of Expressions depends on the contents of the expression – sometimes you have to force evaluation - whereas, for a node, the Maya DG will always do it for you when needed. Debugging a Maya Expression is not easy either (no tools are available), and requires a knowledge of MEL. Using the MathNode plug-in, you can use a Python debugger to debug the Node evaluation. |
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July 2012 |
RemovePrefix for Maya This plug-in can be used to remove DAG node prefix in a scene and referenced files. The command allows you to select one parent node and to specify a prefix to remove on all child node names in the hierarchy. |
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MotionBuilder
| Month | Plugin | Supported Applications |
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September 2012 |
The MotionBuilder Shelf This 'Maya style' shelf in MotionBuilder allows you to access all the key functionality that you would use daily from the Asset Browser, it is now right at your fingertips. You no longer have to dig around in the MotionBuilder UI to look for these items -- they are in one central location for you. The File menu tab is the default display in the tool, giving you quick access at any time to create a new file, open a file, save a file, and save as a file. Additional menus tabs provide you access to default Elements, Primitives, Characters, Constraints, and Devices. This one click creation workflow gives you the objects you desire in your scene immediately. If you’re not sure what the images are, simply hover over the button for the Tooltips. |
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