[lisa]

You could do it by abuse-of-greeble, which works quite well. After seeing tbd's neat-o trick with the bricks, I've been using greebles to build all kinds of things.

1) Make a single link of chain as its own object, and turn it into a custom greeble by putting //CUSTOM_GREEBLE in the object properties.

2) Draw your polyline, keeping each segment of the polyline as close as possible to the length of the link of chain.

3) Extrude the polyline so that it is the width of the chain link as well. You should now have a flat "ribbon" in the shape of your chain. Delete the original polyline, leaving just the ribbon.

4) Select the ribbon and open in the greeble tool. Turn off bevelling, turn on only custom greebles, and set all sizes and percentages to 100% as shown; if you need them bigger to make sure they touch you can even set it beyond 100%. The idea is that you want one, full-size, unrotated greeble on each surface.

(Side note: if you set the tool to leave each greeble in its own object, it will make it easier to go back and tweak the chain later if you want to adjust individual links.)

5) Click the "Create Greebles" button and ta-da, instant chain!