Is it possible to "paint" a solid object repeated many times, to generate a surface made of many copies of the same, automatically?

For example, could i take a 3D cone:

And easily paint many of them across a surface, evenly spaced:

My goal is create knurling using a manually-modelled cone. (The 3D texture tool doesn't produce clean results).

I think Adobe Illustrator can do something like this with 2D objects.