Back in Maya we define areas on the model. This will allow us to hide these areas in Zbrush ; it can be really useful when sculpting a dense mesh which has been subdivided several times as it.
To highlight the areas I assign a material to them then in HyperShade I select each face group using "Select object in xxxx”, "xxxx” being the name of the material.

I create a set for each selection. These sets can be exported in an OBJ file and are recognised by Zbrush.


Back in ZBrush, I import the model and ZBrush automatically recognises the sets and assigns a colour to each one (switch to Frame view to see them).

Ctrl+Shift+click isolates a set of faces and Ctrl+Shift+click outside the model unhides the whole mesh (for more information, check the ZScript on selection modes in the ZBrush documentation).



These areas can also be exported individually in an OBJ file. Here is part of the sculpted model imported in Maya,

To handle complicated models, you can add each part of the model into a layer.