there is a script for maya floating around the interwebs that can shrinkwrap a mesh onto another. its called xy_shrinkwrap or something like that. works just like you described. you can make a cylinder and shrinkwrap it onto a characters arm or something. found a link…
... Max has those tools. Wrapit & Graphite Modeling "Freeform tools" makes it awesome easy. I really don't know of anything like that for Maya, yet. A lot of what they do in those videos with custom scripts has been in max or is easily available, especially their 3 skeleton system. When I first watched that video a while…