I had this idea for an icon a while ago. It is one of a series inspired by architectural details. Feel free to give it a go. This is how I went about doing it.
The iOS icon grid was used to lay out the profile.
Profile & Icon Grid
The vector profile was exported to a PDF file and imported into Cheetah 3D where it was lathed.
Cheetah 3D
I could have fiddled with the lighting within Cheetah 3D to get a perfect render, but I have yet to master 3D lighting. I figured it would be faster to do a number of renders and composite them. The focus of the first render was to get a good shadow. To get the reflection, I applied a silver material to the model and used a HDRI image for the lighting. The third render uses a one of Cheetah 3D's procedural materials. I had to modify the material to obtain a reasonably realistic granite texture.
Render 1 - Plain Render
Render 2 - Reflection Render using one of Cheetah 3D's HDRI Images.
Render 3 - Stone Render
The three renders were composited to create the final image and a blue layer was added to make the centre ball pop.
The Composited Image
I hope you found this useful. Follow me and leave a comment below so that I know who to follow. If you give the above steps a go, I'm keen to see what you come up with.
If you are interested in building your own icon grids, or you are interested in embeding the golden ratio into your icons or buttons, check out my book. It's called Icon Design and it is available on iBooks in 32 countries.
