Pseudo-3D Geometric Forms

Question

While putting to practice everything I've learned in this meanwhile regarding art restoration/enhancement I've got this one so destroyed due to consecutive JPEG compressions from multiple sources that I just can't save the background.

But before I can replace it I must ask how could I reproduce this polygon:

It has some pseudo-3D appearance with 3 distinct colours, inside, outside and the borders. The shape appears 4 times in the picture, at different parts (you can see a blue shine of a second instance close to this brownish-orange one) and with different positions, so I must be able to adjust this... extrusion? E.g: the blue one nearby has both the "hole" and the darker area turned right, down inclined. Theoretically, I believe it should suffice to duplicate and rotate, but who knows...

Additionally, it also has this spiky shine behind with two distinct colours with a tiny fade when they change. If they could emit light over the main image — which I already finished the stressful selection (so many curves... >.<) — it would be awesome, but not entirely required.

Problem is I have no idea how could I do that. In past, I had very bad experiences with Photoshop's way of dealing with shapes. Back in the day, I had to make the shape with the correct dimensions right at the first try because the edges became blurry after Free Transforming.

Of course, that certainly was just me knowing less than I know today but, in any event, I thought for the best to ask first how could I do that.

Thank you for your time

Answer 1

I know you asked for Photoshop, but in my opinion it would be much easier in to create such a pseudo-3D shape in Adobe Illustrator, by using its Live Paint functionality.

It's easier because all you need to do is draw lines with strokes - using the raster image to trace over the top. Closed shapes aren't required. Also, there's no messing around with shape layers like in Photoshop.

Then you can turn it into a Live Paint object. And fill the segments using the Live Paint Bucket, holding down Alt to sample the colours from the raster image with the eyedropper.

Example - here I'm halfway through colouring it.

When you have finished you can change the stroke colour or remove the stroke entirely.

The beauty of this is that it's all vector. You can even place the finished AI in Photoshop, and when you resize it will not suffer from quality degradation.

Another possibility is to make a 3d extrusion in Illustrator, using a heptagon, with a thick stroke.

Then Expand the Appearance, ungroup, and fill the different segments with the required colours. Finish by drawing a blue shape and send to the bottom of the stack, then add additional paths for the inside corners, and fill as required.