I want to share an Abaqus/CAE Plug-in I've created some years ago. Some more Plug-ins will follow in the next weeks.

What can it do?
 

In Abaqus/CAE it is not possible to select instances in the viewport to delete or suppress them. The selection has always to be done in the model tree. This makes it quite hard and time consuming to work on a large assembly, especially when it was imported and the instance names are basically the same.

My Plug-in overcomes this limitation and allows selection in the viewport. This enables the typical usage of the drag-box combined with the ctrl- and shift-keys. The Plug-in also allows reverse selection usage and suppressing instead of deleting. Additionally it can delete the parts that are now unused after instances were deleted.

The viewport selection makes it possible now, to reduce the displayed entities with the Display Group tool first. For example when a lot of standalone face and line parts were in the imported file and you want to get rid of them in Abaqus/CAE. You could now hide all cells with one Display Group action and delete all remaining instance in the viewport with one drag-box selection.
 

The short video below shows an example. The files are attached.
 

Additional remarks:
 

This Plug-In is not an official Dassault Systemes/Simulia product. I’ve created it on my own and initially only for me.
 

The UI is built with the RSG Plug-in. This brings some limitations regarding catching user errors and displaying messages.

Edit: You can find an updated version that also works with Python 3 in Abaqus 2024 in my Github account (Link).