Drawing on curved surfaces

I am trying to model the command sphere from the movie 2001.The surface of the sphere has raised panels .I made a sphere and then used planes to create intersection curves on the sphere.This allowed me to make segments.I split the segments and then used offsetcurveonsrf command to make panels on the individual segments .This has worked for me but it is pretty time consuming.Is there a simpler way to draw on double curved surfaces? Unrollsrf does not work with double curved surfaces and the smash function creates flat surfaces that are weird shapes. I tried using the pull function and it does work, but it is hard to draw the panl shapes on the flat surface and get them to match the segments.

Hello - Probably you can get what you want with Split > Isocurve. Watch the command line options for the direction.

-Pascal

thank you