Attempting to help someone out on cgTalk with a problem I decided to create a quick demo on projecting splines on surfaces in c4d. Even though this is only half the solution and just one of the ways you could do this, I still hope you find it useful.
You can create circular patterns on a sphere by projecting splines along a plane onto a polygon object. Which is really easy to do, the hard part would be to figure out the pattern and correcting tiling dimensions needed to generate the ornate spherical pattern that has been described.
“Hey there, can any help me to find out, how to build a ball like this one at 0:16 in the middle!?
http://www.maxonpodcast.de/movies/no_keyframes_480p.mov”
My suggestion would be to figure out the pattern in 2d first, then you should be able to project one 5-point star, then duplicate and rotate the rest of the sections from the sphere’s center point. Figuring out the size a sphere to project the fixed pattern on my bay a little tricky also however, most likely trial and error while trying to find the right amount of distortion needed.
Anyways, back to spline projections to get you stared.
Prepping objects for a good projection. Create an arc object and set it’s type to bezier with uniform interpolation. Use the object axis tool to move the objects pivot to the start of the spline. Then move the spline back to world origin. Create an array object and drop the spline in as a child. Inside the array object’s attributes you can set the radius of the array. Dropping the radius to zero will create a default 7 point star, I set the radius however to be 10 so that when I sweep these paths later on I could easily patch together all the sweeps in the center ( all values described based on my relative default object sizes used during generation 
). To change the star to be five points drop the number of copies in the array to be 4, remember array’s start at zero! Or the master object and 4 copies. That does it for the curves.
Create a sphere to be projected onto and set the segments fairly high so that when we project our splines the bezier points have enough information available to sample from. Please note my bezier curve above shows 5 points because when I made the curve editable it’s interpolation was set to adaptive. If you try to project a spline with few points onto a faceted sphere you will get undesired results since the spline points align to the normals of the polygon it falls on. Make sure to make the sphere large enough to overlap all the splines from the top view and your sphere should be ready to be projected onto. Also note I pulled the array up above the sphere for illustrative purposes, which is not actually needed based on the projection mode I will be using.
For the actual projection you first want to make your array of splines editable. If you try and just select the spline under the array node and create the project you will again get undersired results as the splines will loosely fit the sphere. With the splines now their own objects select the Project command under Structure > Edit Spline > Project. In the tools options set the mode to xz plane which will function as described. Click apply and you should see the splines fit to the surface of the spere.
You can now hide the sphere, but might want to hold onto it for awhile, never know when you might need to know the parameters of the sphere again. Create a circle object, set it’s interpolation to uniform, and rename it “profile_master”. Create an instance of the profile_master to be used in all 5 sweeps. Next create a sweep nurbs object and drop your profile instance in as a child first, followed by the first spline path. You should see your sweep object, now you can adjust the number of intermediate uniform points on both your profile and path splines to get the desired resolution for a smooth yet optimized mesh. Tweek some of the fun parameters like the end scale of the sweep. Now that the sweep has been initialized just duplicate you sweep parent 4 times and then replace the duplicated path with the other 4 paths. You should end up with something like this.
Having the master circle object makes it easy to adjust the initial thickness of the sweeps. You could also use instance objects for you paths, or just make one sweep and then instance the sweep object. Probably a dozen different approaches but I’ll stick to this one. Now that you have all your sweeps create a group for them which is centered at the world origin (assuming your sphere was initially centered at world origin). Duplicate the group and you can rotate it anywhere you want. I would of course patch up the center before you do that.
That’s the general premise of how I would attack the problem considering I’m not a mathematician or anything. Sorry I could help you out with the pattern! I have a feeling the golden ratio is hidden in there somewhere. Might have to investigate it more though sometime as you can make some really cool forms like this. 
