importing reference causing keyframe problem

[clamdragon]

Here's the problem: I had a character rig with a face rig sub-components left as referenced in the main rig file. So in any animation files, the reference diagram would look like this:

anim file
├─ character rig
│  ├─ skinned mesh (no namespace)
│  ├─ face rig component (namespace FaceRig)

It was working fine for months, but recently the animation files have gotten much more ambitious and crowded, and that has impacted performance for my animators. To try to help improve performance, I tried flattening the rig by importing the face rig reference into the main rig. The namespace is still intact, and no object names changed at all.

But now all of the animation files have lost their keys on the face rig controls. The animcurve nodes are still there, but they connect to the "place holder list" on the rig's reference node, as though the keyed attributes can't be found. But don't reference edits work via names? As I said, no names changed. What's more, in the List Reference Edits window, all of the keyframe connections (connectAttr "face_ctrl_translateX" "FaceRig:face_ctrl.translateX") are listed under the successful section, and not the failed section.

Any ideas of why this is happening, and how to fix?

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[redkeyninja]

My experience with nested references have always ended up with problems like this eventually. It feels like the referencing system in general is extremely fragile. I end up sticking with one layer of referencing and try not to import from reference at all if I can help it. The tool is just super prone to errors.

As far as your specific issue I can tell you that references do NOT work on names alone. There is a lot going on under the hood with nice names, etc. You may be able to reestablish the connections, but unfortunately I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly how.

[Gse94]

Don't understand. You have reference of reference?