i think what Oglu meant when asking if it's an "inhouse test" was if you are already in the studio and it's just a test to transfer to a different department / team.
after having made the trousers and the top that will use as the base for the mail chain armor then i transfered the skin weihgts from the main body to these parts
I usually use a combination of "make live" "append to polygon tool" and "transfer attributes" (for vertex positions). Not the speediest maybe, but all native Maya.
Thank you, these are just standard brushes: a hard round brush with transfer, and sometimes a soft fuzzy round brush for stuff like atmosphere and glow.
Remesh it in something, take the result into Mudbox as well as your bad mesh, and use Mesh->Transfer Details in Mudbox to get something good to sculpt on.