I'm trying to create an embossed text effect or conversely a sunken text effect on the surface of a metal sphere.

My approach so far has been to create the text at a certain thickness, snap the text to the quad point of the sphere so that most of the text is "sunken" into the sphere, then do a boolean intersect between sphere and text so that I'm left with a piece of text the surface of which is curved in such a way that conforms exactly to the surface of a sphere of that size.

Then I adjust the height of the text relative to the sphere and do a boolean union (for embossed) or a subtract (for sunken) and fillet the result to get rounded edges. It seems to work, but I can't help feeling it's a bit clunky and long-winded. Is there a better way?

Cheers
Dan