How to 3D Wood

Question

I closed the previous question as I misrepresented it by accident
Hello All,
I have Illustrator CS2 and can get my hands on some nice vector files of wood.
I would like to be able to use the 3D feature (no need for beveling), but the sides of the object do not carry over the wood.  So it really doesn't look like 3D wood.  More like a 3d object with a wood  veneer.
So is there a way to make the entire thing look 3D?
Below is a before and after. how can I make that GRAY area, part of the wood. I actually don't care about the beveling part. Just rotatable 3D.
Thanks
http://www.warptv.com/wood2.jpg

Answer 1

As you can tell in the attempt you have already made at mapping a Symbol to a 3D Effect object, the program merely allows you to map artwork contained in a Symbol to one surface at a time. It cannot "wrap" a texture around adjacent faces. There are no procedural textures as in a full-blown 3D modeling program.
So if you insist on doing this in Illustrator, you need to create separate Symbols for the end and side woodgrain textures. You can get away with one symbol for the sides if you use the Scale To Fit option and alternatingly flop the Symbol so that the edges reasonably convincingly seem to wrap around the corner edges.
If you are after anything approaching convincing realism, you can do it with more time and work than in the quick demo below, but it will be much more tedious than simply using a full-blown 3D modeler / renderer, most of which offer multiple woodgrain procedural textures (textures that can automatically wrap around whole objects) built-in.
A fine-grained wood texture (mahogany and such) like in your sample would be more forgiving. But you still need a different image for the endgrain, and you still have to map the texture to each construct that Illustrator considers a surface. For example, if you use rounded corners in the extrusion, you will see in the Map Artwork interface that those, too, are considered separate surfaces. Again, you can do it using the principle depicted above, but it becomes increasingly tedious when you involve rounds and bevels. AI's 3D Effect cannot "shrink wrap" a single image around what it considers a multi-surface whole object.
JET