The trek continues…
After hours of preparing the files in Maya, exporting them to Rhino, then arranging them in Illustrator, I got what I needed to send them to the laser printer. 
Went down to
Canal Plastics and bought the material (1.5mm thick clear plastic)
Submitted the files to
AMS (Advanced Media Services from NYU).
BUT – the job was too big… It would take 12 hours to cut the entire sphere. So I had to simplify the project and submitted only 1/8th of the sphere…
Figured out that joining pieces together in the real world is a lot harder than it seems… software is sooooo much easier… heheehh…
In any case – happy that what was supposed to match up did and looks all right despite the unjoined rings in the center.