The approach involved creating the icon twice: once as a textured 3D model, and again as a stack of Photoshop shape layers. This seemed nuts — doing twice the work for the same result. Yet there are benefits. The freedom to scale up an icon indefinitely without rerendering is among them. But, more importantly, the Russian “double-drawn” method affords a much higher degree of control.
(via John Marstall on Medium. Linked via The Loop)
This is very similar to the method I used on the Teleprompt+ 3 icon. I created a teleprompter in Cheetah 3D, lit it, rendered it out very large, then recreated the exact angles and shapes using vectors in Photoshop so that it could scale to any size. Then I could tweak the color and shading as needed.
Even with vectors for the final product, I needed to tweak every single icon size manually, of course.
