Hi steve, you might want to look at ZSurf for generating a base surface - it works by taking in a grayscale bitmap that is used as a heightfield with light and dark areas of the bitmap being used to make valleys or ridges in the output surface.

So to prepare the bitmap for that you would use something like Photoshop to put in some brush strokes and blur their edges.

It should probably be a better route to make a kind of continuous surface that has a relief pattern in it, it's not practical to just try and boolean away a zillion different spheres, you will be making too many little slivery surface bits that way.

See here for some links to some ZSurf information:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3825.2

ZSurf can also wrap its result directly on some kinds of shapes instead like a cylinder or I think a sphere too.


There are also programs out there that specialize in deforming a mesh model by applying brush strokes to it, those are probably more directly oriented with the type of stuff that I think you are describing (stuff like raised relief patterns), you might want to check out Sculptris which is one of the easiest to use of those types of programs: http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/ - these types of programs make polygon mesh output though and not NURBS surface output so you can only load the geometry they create into a polygon mesh program and not into MoI unless you do some more specialized type of conversions.

- Michael