Here’s an example of how it works in Blender . Hopefully it makes sense!
From the first part of that video it looks like what I described.
I’m a little confused on how I’d get that working in practice…
You’d have to iterate over all the vertices, find the closest point on the surface of the target (human) model, then that vertex to the closest point found. The BVH class referenced above is an acceleration structure for making this kind of spatial query much faster and already includes a function for finding the closest point. The docs and examples should show how to create a BVH and query it directly – it’s likely there isn’t anything that will “just work” for the type of geometry manipulation you’re talking about here.