Yellow/golden forehead, blue/teal under the eyes and chin, red cheeks and nose, and pink lips I created different layers and painted the face with these colors. Human skin is divided into three color zones: yellow, red, and blue.

Once I was satisfied with the secondary layer, it was time to add some color variations.

This adds a bit of warmth to her face, and bring out her features Then I started adding some color to her eyebrows, eyes, and lips.

I created a fill layer and filled it with an Ambient Occlusion map, set the blending mode to Multiply and opacity to 50% to only apply the dark parts of the AO.

This is just simply a flat color, a base skin tone layer In the image I have separated each of the textures I used for Ellie's face. This technique is not the best for high realism, but for this project it's enough. Now I have a lower poly mesh with super clean topology and UVs. I selected the source mesh first (the simulated mesh) and shift selected the target mesh (the quad flat mesh) and clicked Transfer to wrap the flat mesh to the simulated mesh. This time, I made sure Vertex position is 'on' and Sample space is 'UV' in the Attribute settings. It was time to import the simulated mesh, since they both had the same UVs I transferred the vertex position of the flat mesh to the simulated mesh by using Transfer Attributes again. The quad flat mesh has the same UV as the tri mesh. ZRemesher will never give you a perfect result, so make sure you spend time to fix the quad mesh if needed. In order to transfer UVs, the quad mesh's edge borders needed to be aligned perfectly over the tri mesh. At this stage, I needed to import two flat meshes, the original one with UVs from Marvelous Designer, and the one that I quadrangulated in ZBrush. I recovered the UVs in Maya by using Transfer Attributes.

Now I had a clean quad mesh but I lost the UVs. I need a clean topology to sculpt so I used ZRemesher to quadrangulate it.

Next, I imported the flat mesh from MD to ZBrush. The second mesh is the flat mesh - I selected the mesh and clicked Reset 2D Arrangement to flatten it and used the same export settings. The first is the simulated mesh - make sure to check these boxes in the Export settings: Single object, Thin, and Unweld. First, I exported two meshes from Marvelous Designer. This workflow gives a super clean topology mesh with UVs, and it also saves a lot of time. It is quite hard to explain the clothing retopology workflow in words, so it might be a bit confusing.

Last of us ellie face model