Skinned Cloth vertex color, any way to use vertex color painted in 3d program?

I’d like to make parts of my character mesh react using the skinned cloth, but I’m unable to use the built-in Unity tool for painting the information since it doesn’t display all the verts. Is there a way to paint vertex colors in a 3d program and then read the colors and setup the skinned cloth that way?
Or should the pieces affected by skinned cloth be separate meshes?

Just bumping this, as I’m having exactly the same problem!
I’ve painted the verts I want to use in Maya but am having trouble using the vertex colour data in Unity with the cloth system

Bump. Is anybody doing this?