There are a few ways that you can have a plane wrap around a sphere in Maya. You can choose to do it with deformers, dynamics, or even muscle systems.
In more recent versions of Maya there is the addition of the Shrink Wrap Deformer, which was designed to do that very task.
Here, sherkhan shows how you can wrap a plane around a sphere by using the Maya Transfer Attributes command.
You can easily wrap a plane around a sphere by simply transferring the vertices from one object to the other.
