Interesting Questions. Personally speaking, I'd do the uvs and main color texture before going into Zbrush unless Im doing the texture in zb of course. Rig it all after, if not you can always add blends to a rig after as long as you create them as a parallel shape, and not in default mode, see the options for this in maya. Your textures will still fit back in maya after some sculpting but depending on how extreme you pull the mesh about in zb some tweaks may be needed back in maya, but usually a hit of th relax button should cure them. Also rememeber you can sculpt in zb with a texture 'on' so you can see whats happening while you sculpt and have the best of both worlds. With regard to blendshapes. Create them all at the lowest or manageable resolution first in Maya. Then you could take them into ZB and add detail to them after then export dis maps for each shape. Then once back in maya you could set up the displacements maps to coincide with your animation, basically key them at specific places to match the appropriate blend shapes. Also be aware that regardless of the mesh from maya to ZB, as gster says it will differ and move the geo even very slightly, so its always best to run all your shapes thru Zb even if you dont sculpt them all. I just wanna add that Ive just this week run 30+ blendshapes thru zb and back into maya. . Some shapes are more subtle than others, but look nice all the same. I have two sets of shapes: one hi rez and one low res. The hi rez have the details on and the low rez are there for purely base mesh target creation. The Hi rez mesh has 20k polys and looks very nice with the shapes moving about. Im not using displacements as the shapes look pretty damn cool on export and also I find dis maps and maya STILL very temperamental when it comes to render times so its worth checking this option out too. Optimise your work flow to what suits you best, I hope some of these options will help you out. Have a play and find whats best for your project. I'll post up a grab of my shapes later cheers Jay