3d Extrude in Illustrator

I just finished creating an ad to be printed in the local paper to highlight the "Simple Steps to register" at Cerro Coso. This was a very short turn around project in which I had about 2 hours to work up the design, which was a spin off of an article done at our sister college Bakersfield College.

The cool thing about this project was that I had an opportunity to play with the 3d extrude feature in Illustrator. A pretty nifty little effect. I found it pretty easy to work with, and it's cool that you can go back in and edit the effect if need be. I do wish that preview was automatically checked as that threw me more than once when the effect would disappear all of a sudden, but hey, I just need to pay better attention. This is a really cool feature though and it really expands what we can do artistically with Illustrator.

What would be really cool would be if you could place objects together and merge them so you could build more complex objects, much like in 3d software packages. But then, I suppose I should just go open Maya if I want to do that...