How can I connect an animation from an "orphaned" namespace to a new character reference?

[dennis3V39Z]

I had a character reference that I animated on. Unfortunately, when it was first created, it's namespace became a child of another character's namespace by mistake. So both characters namespace under reference editor was shown as "anim" with the second character namespace showing as "anim:anim" in outliner.

I then tried to rename both characters namespaces by mistake through the reference editor. Reference editor didn't do a good job.

One character managed to update all it's nodes with the new namespace, the other character did not. After I saved and reloaded the scene, I found the second character without any animation.

Through some research I realized that I now had 3 namespaces. The two new ones I created, and the old one, that showed up in namespace editor as "anim" with a child namespace named "anim". Both of these containing some items with animation in them, totally disconnected from my second character.

Now what? How can I fix this?

I've tried saving the scene to .ma and opening it in a text editor to rename all new namespace occurrences to the old namespace. This didn't work.

At this point I'm ready to call it quits and redo the animation cause I already lost half a day trying to fix this.

Unless anyone has a proper procedure to suggest.

Let me know! thanks.

[jmreinhart]

This probably won't help you at this stage, but I thought I might as well share what I was able to find out while looking into this yesterday.

So this is what I was able to find out

• In Maya the reference nodes (the ones with nodeType "reference") don't have the namespace the reference is associated with in their own name. So you wouldn't see a node named "exampleNamespace: exampleNamespaceRN" you would see a node named "exampleNamespaceRN".
• The only time a reference node does have a namespace prefix with a colon is if the namespace they are associated with is a child of another namespace. So, in your case you would see "animRN" and "anim:animRN".
• When you change the namespace associated with the reference, the name of the reference node does not change, so if you changed the namespace of the first reference from "anim" to "larry" the reference node would still be called "animRN" not "larryRN".

So what seems to have happened:

1. You created a reference with the namespace "anim".
2. You create a second reference with the namespace "anim" under the existing namespace.
3. You renamed the first reference in the reference editor.
4. You renamed the second reference in the reference editor.
5. The second reference node was no longer associated with a child namespace.
6. The reference node lost the namespace prefix "anim:animRN" tried to become "animRN"
7. "animRN" already existed because of the first reference. 
8. So instead "anim:animRN" became "animRN1"

This is where I get a bit unsure

The reference node preserved the connections to the animation animCurves even after being renamed, but it lost the association with the controls that were referenced in. I'm going to try and dig into a simple Maya ASCII file to learn what made that association break.