Take the model down to it’s lowest subdivision level first. Then only show the problem area by hiding everything else.
Then you can spend some time evaluating where your mesh has gone wrong by closely examining the geometry. Turn on Polyframe to help look at where the topology lines are flowing into each other or getting otherwise warped or wonky.
Now, once you’ve got a visual idea of what went wrong, you can start masking off and hiding all the stuff that is “correct” leaving you with only the stuff that is bad.
Start taking the bad verts and moving them around 1 by 1 and getting them to play nice by pulling and pushing them in 3d space until they’re not so tangled up. Don’t use the smoothing brush, but the Move brush to do this. Vert by Vert, until you untangle the mess.
Once you have pulled out the errant and stray verts, then set your smoothing brush to a very very low zadd level and lightly start smoothing out and relaxing the problem geometry until you get a nice topology again, then you can smooth out normally and won’t get any problems.
Now when done with that you can go up to the next subdivision level and do the entire process over again, and so on, until you get to your highest subdivision level.
Or, you can take the mesh back to Maya, do the same work in 10 minutes that it would take 45 minutes to do in zbrush (vert by vert modelling correction with soft-selection is going to be alot faster outside back in maya) and fix the problems that way. If you want to keep your subdivision levels intact I don’t use Maya so I can’t help with that but I’m sure it can be done somehow, find a tutorial on that here probably or in the tutorials forum or by googling it if that’s your wish.
Before GoMax I would do this kind of work in zbrush and it would be very difficult to wrestle out this kind of stubborn geometry, to the point where I would sometimes just abandon a project if this unfortunately occured. But now that I know max and have Gomax, I simply jump my models over to max and do all that precision stuff over there in minutes, then send it right back over to zbrush as it’s 10 times faster and easier. See if you can’t do something like that with Maya first is my recommendation, although it can be done as I described in zbrush, you will be saving yourself alot of frustration to do it in Maya if it’s possible.
