In my project, I am creating a system for deforming a highly detailed mesh (clothing) so that it 'fits' a convex mesh. To do this I use depth maps of the item and the 'hull' to determine at what point in world space the deviation occurs and the extent.

Simply transforming all occluded vertices to the depths as defined by the 'hull' is fairly effective, and has good performance, but it suffers the problem of not preserving the features of the mesh and requires extensive culling to avoid false-positives.

I would like instead to generate from the depth deviation map a set of simple 'deformers' which will 'push'* all vertices of the deformed mesh outwards (in world space). This way, all features of the mesh are preserved and there is no need to have complex heuristics to cull inappropriate vertices.

I am not sure how to go about generating this deformer set however. I am imagining something like an algorithm that attempts to match a spherical surface to each patch of contiguous deviations within a certain range, but do not know where to start doing this.

Can anyone suggest a suitable filter or algorithm for generating deformers? Or to put it another way 'compressing' a depth map?

(*Push because its fitting to a convex 'bulgy' humanoid so transforms are likely to be 'spherical' from the POV of the surface.)