For users taking advantage of the benefits Factory Design Suite offers when generating layouts, an update to the Factory Asset Warehouse has now enabled the possibility to create Custom Chain Assets.
In four simple steps you can use the 'Build Asset Chain' tool to convert your Factory Asset Warehouse content to a chain item. Once completed this is now ready to use in AutoCAD as a chain asset, upon Inventor Sync this content will then generate and be layed out inside Inventor.
See the updated wiki help for more detail on this topic.
http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Factory_Design_Suite/enu/2013/Help/0000-Asset_Ch0
For those of you not lucky enough to use this product, one advantage when using Factory Design Suite is the simple way you can create a 2D layout in AutoCAD. This can then be synced into Inventor which generates the 3D representation. With 2013 this functionality was extended to include Chain Asset functionality, which effectively allows the user to define a polyline representation of a repeating asset such as a conveyor. When synced back to Inventor a repeating 3D connected assets will be placed.
