Animating/instantiating particles along a sphere

Unity Engine
1

Hey folks

Im tasked to try and implement an effect sort of like the one seen here (at 1:20) :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqBrsXUtByc

The catch is, that I cant make the effect in an animated texture/shader type deal. I have to try and use physics and particle systems. The effect can of course vary alot from the Youtube clip, there is alot of wiggle room. So my thought was to have a sphere collider around my player, read the contact point from the collision between the sphere and a rigidbody, make a “ring/pulse/wave” -type particle system, and instantiate this system at the contact point(I have the contact point info and particle systems implemented already). However, that wont make the effect happen along the surface of the sphere.
Does anyone have an idea on how to make this happen? Is there a better way of doing this without the use of a special texture/shader?

EDIT: If it helps, the scale and position of the sphere will not change, and these parameter are known to me at any time
EDIT2: Moved the thread here, I believe this is more of a scripting question than Unity support question =)

2

If you have the particle system position slightly away from the contact point instead of right on it, with velocity pushing the particles into the sphere collider, and gave the particle system a world particle collider, it might look sort of like that; the particles should bounce along the surface. But ultimately I think you’d need to do it with a material or something on the sphere (have a fancy looking translucent texture on the material and bring the alpha to 0, then bring the alpha up only on the areas of the mesh near the contact point).