MayaStaion has a post by by Annick Harmel-Tourneur on getting namespaces in Maya without file referencing.
“When trying to organize large production files, it is a good idea to use namespaces. They are easy to set up and can be used without referencing. If you want to add a namespace to some or all the nodes in Maya you will need to create the name space and then rename the objects to use it.
So for example I have an object called “sphere” in my scene:
namespace -add “one”; //will add the namespace to the scene
rename “sphere” “one:sphere”; //will rename the sphere
This will do the trick to add the sphere in that namespace. If you want to change it , you can once again use the rename command to rename it to another namespace.
To keep things organize it’s also very useful to be able to list the available namespace in a current scene. For this you can use :
namespaceInfo -lon;
…and off course with the magic of FBX these namespace will get carried to other apps, like Motion Builder, Mudbox.”
