Working with low-res rig to hi-res rig workflow

So I tried a few ways to do this, using wrap deforners, influence joints etc but most techniques I found online didnt work for me. Luckily I came up with my own solution, a little crude but it does do the job.

1. So I have a animation scene blocked out with a low res rig made with HumanIK naming convention
2. I want to replace the low-res with a hi-res geometry to the scene
3. Open the original rigged low-res ( goto bind pose )
4. import the hi-res model ( they should be in a similar pose )
5. select hi-res Smooth bind to the top joint on low-res rig
6. select low res than hi-res, SKIN > EDIT SMOOTHSKIN > COPY WEIGHTS
7. hide the low-res GEO
8. now you need to smooth flood all the joints on the hi-poly skin, make sure POST is selected
9. once thats done, you should have an exact copy of your rig, but with a hi-res model
10. rename the parent group of joints to high_xxx and also rename the hi-res GEO ( no need to rename all joints as we will be using namespace import later)
11. delete the low-res GEO
12. save the scene as a new hi-res skeleton. We will be referencing this scene later.
13. Open the blocked out scene with the low-res rig
14. Reference the hi-res rig into the scene, USING A NEW NAMESPACE. I used “hi_rig:”
15. Now you should have the two rigs you need to match the joints on the hi-res to the low-res by using PARENT CONSTRAINT with no offset.
16. As I am not a MEL script guru, I manually parent constraint each bone from low to hi-res.
17. But you only need to do this once, because after you are done, just look in your SCRIPT EDITOR and copy all the commands you used to do this and save it out as a MELscript
18. I cheated by copying and replacing Left to Right commands, which saved me time 🙂
19. copy paste and save all the commands into a text editor
20. this will be a script you need to run each time you want to re-reference the hi-res rig into the scene.
21. As long as the bone names stay the same, the script will work.
22. You can than hide your low-res rig and enjoy the hi-res. Good thing with using this technique is you are using a referenced scene, which means now you can change the hi-res model if needed.