Hi David,
I hope you are doing fine as well, considering what is going on at the moment. Yes, I “Stay Home” of course, to protect the ones who are risking their lives for others right now.
I think I always enjoyed the idea about tracing from images, but in the past 25 years, I haven’t really seen something that comes close to what can be done manually. Besides, I love the relaxing work of tracing from time to time. To get by with as little points as possible, to recreate a shape as elegantly has is kind of meditation and can let me slip right into the zone.
Speaking of minimal amounts of points to create the most elegant solutions is not the key here, as each point represents the only way to change the shape towards the sphere. So we need lots of them. The same is true for the sphere, the more points it has, the cleaner the projection will be. Hence my extreme value for the segments.
Your texture was tiled five-time. Since the Surface Deformer can tile, the needed information has to come from a Cloner. To create usable material, a Connect Object needs to be involved.
After all of that, I create a copy with Current State to Object, this gave me the solution that you will find below: [updated]
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/mVgCD3gEtgFOAebaSpQGBZu0roHu2nXypKiA5mCKTzE
Screenshot
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/KHZeQfRyhN1dORQ6JRXw85C0R4E2zGgA0373gLTgqTL
You will see a plane in the file, I used this to “draw” the one tile information.
I hope that helps. Let me know if something else is needed. I am, as always, happy to look into it.
Stay healthy!