The distance from the point to the surface easily calculated using the NLPSolve of Optimization package. If the point is not special, we will find for it a point on the surface, the distance between these two points is the shortest between the selected point and the surface.
Two examples:  the implicit surface and the parametric surface.
To test, we restore the normals from the  calculated  points (red) by using analytical equations.
DISTANCE_TO_SURFACE.mw


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