replacing an object in maya

I had finished a tutorial in which you do keyframes for an axe going into a target, then in this new tutorial you then replace the more simple looking axe for a more detailed one and transfer the keyframes over to the new model. This is really usefull as it means you can animate a scene and get the animation looking really nice, then transfer those keyframes over to a much more detailed model, which would have otherwise slowed down the scene with the size of the file. This is something which I could potentially incorpreate into my work if for example the character models are late in being made or to reduce the size of the file im working on untill i need to render the scene.