Duplicate Mark Values

When working in a worksharing enviornment, you are likely to come across 'Duplicate Mark Value' warnings. 

 

These happen because Revit auto-generates Mark values for a variety of components (pipes, ducts, fittings, etc.)  For example, if two users are working on the same model, UserA adds a Duct, and Revit assigns the duct a Mark of 1.  UserB adds a Duct, and since his session of Revit knows nothing about UserA's duct yet, it also assigns 1.  When the users sync with central, there ends up being two Ducts with the Mark value of 1.

As far as I know, there is no negative impact of having these... however, they are annoying, and may cause concern if, for example, you tell your architect that you prefer their models to be 'warning free'.... if you send them a model full of warnings, it becomes a double standard.

To address these, you can use the Revit Model Review Add-in (available on Subscription Center) to define a series of checks.  The video demonstrates how the checkes were defined for a variety of MEP categories.  You can add checks for other categories as necessary.

The checks in the demonstration 'require' that all the Mark values be empty, and the 'Fix' tool in the Model Checker will clear out any non-empty values.  With the values empty, they're not intrepreted as duplicate, and the warnings are cleard.

If you use the Mark parameter for other purposes, such as identifying mechanical equipment (i.e., EF-1, AHU-4-2, etc), you wouldn't want to 'fix' these using the tool (because you would clear out the valid values, in addition to the duplicates).  However, for Duct, Pipe, Conduit, Cable Tray, and associated fittings and accessory, this is a quick and effective way to clear the duplicate mark warnings.

The video is availabe on YouTube.

Comments

[Luke]

I do something a little tricky - I leave the default mark values to be automatically generated by Revit, and then I create a 'Shared Mark' parameter - I use this for door numbering and scheduling. This tricks Revit - Revit doesn't care if two elements have the same 'Shared Mark'.

As with all workarounds - use with care. Its not 'best practice' BIM...

my blog here

[Martin Schmid]

Thanks Luke... however, the underlying issue here is that Revit auto-assigns mark values. I'll clarify my modifying the original post.

[Trevor M. Uitvlugt]

I had difficulty in setting up the "Clear Mark Values" management routine. Could you demonstrate (via you tube) the creation of the management sets from scratch? Thanks!