Can one mesh be mapped onto another?

Support Modeling
1

I’m looking for a way to do a bump map but with actual geometry so I can zoom in close.

One object is a sphere, and another is a flash mesh with specific vertices that I want to use to modify the surface of the sphere. So I guess I’m looking for a way to map the “bump mesh” vertices onto the sphere’s surface so that I can then extrude them toward or away from the center of the sphere.

Is there any way to do this? I’ll admit I’m new to Blender and I’m looking into it specifically to do this one thing. I’ve read through some tutorials and reviewed most of the features in the manual but I haven’t found anything that seems like it would do this.

2

You want the Retopo Tool. There is also a video tutorial about Retopo floating around somewhere. I’ll post if I can find it again.

3

It would be cool to have a zproject brush added to retopo.
The retopo would work, but it is slow as you have to go into edit mode, and select the vertices and click retopoall.

A faster method is to brush the vertices.

Means I can model body parts separately, and then brush the details onto a multires mesh.

We have code to snap vertices to underlying surfaces. How hard is it to link the function to a brush?