Various features of the Factory Design Utilities are collected together on the following palettes:
The Asset Browser provides access to Factory Assets that help define a factory's makeup. Assets can include architectural features, manufacturing equipment, material handling equipment, process equipment, and so on. The Asset Browser provides access to both System Assets and User Assets. It also provides a search tool for quickly locating the desired asset.
System Assets are dedicated factory assets, delivered with the product or based on a cloud server, that help expedite the process of creating a layout. System Assets are 3D assets and have 2D representations for use in AutoCAD Factory Design Utilities. Thus, a 2D layout populated with Systems Assets can be used as a new layout in Inventor Factory, or as a DWG overlay, and populated with 3D assets associated with their 2D positions.
User Assets are user-defined custom assets authored and published in Inventor Factory. User assets may also contain asset variants, called iAssets. These assets are created with varying dimensional (or other) Inventor parameters that enable different versions of the same asset to be used in a factory layout. Selecting and placing an asset variant from the Asset Browser is facilitated through the use of a pop-up context menu. Asset variations are particularly useful in AutoCAD Factory as modifying the dimensions or features of an existing 2D asset without variants is a tedious process.
The Block Browser lists all blocks in the current drawing with their asset attributes. You can double-click a block to build and publish an asset in the Asset Builder.
The Material Flow Browser provides access to the factory definitions such as stations, products, and routings. The browser presents a three-tabbed interface to enable easy definition and modification. From the browser you can select stations, products, or routings and modify properties, modify or redefine stations and station connectors, modify routings, and so on.
The Factory Properties palette shows the properties of the currently selected asset or material flow object.