Illustrator Freezing When Adding Second 3d Revolve

Question

Hi,
I've been using Illustrator for almost 48 hours now in an effort to make a 3d logo for my next website and everything has been going fine until I try to add a second 3d revolve effect to a globe containing letters. Whenever I do this Illustrator stops responding at multiple points during the process and freezes permenantly when I click ok and the loading bar for "rendering artwork" is halfway through.
I've tried making Illustrator a high priority process in Windows Task Manager, but that does not help. I don't have many other programs running and the ones that are (Firefox, FileZilla, Notepad) don't use up much system memory. When frozen Illustrator only takes up 50-60% of the CPU and about 600MB of memory.
I am running Illustrator CS5 on a Windows 7 PC:
Processor: Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU E5700 3GHz
RAM: 4 GB
The desired end result I am looking for is nearly identical to the following image, but with the name of my site instead of "breaking news":
http://www.clipartof.com/portfolio/stockillustrations/illustration/3d-black-red-and-silver -breaking-news-globe-212078.html
Is Illustrator capable of making such an image?

Answer 1

...I try to add a second 3d revolve effect to a globe containing letters. Whenever I do this Illustrator stops responding...
It would not be at all surprising for a double-application of 3D Effect to cause it to perform at such a crawl as to make you think it crashed--or to actually make it crash. You're misunderstanding AI's 3D Effect.
Do not apply multiple applications of 3D Effect to the same object. Even if it didn't hang, the results would not be what you expect. For example: Forget about the orbiting text; I'll get to that in a minute. Suppose you just have a 3-character word, "Not", converted to paths. The paths are filled, and unstroked, as they should be. You apply 3D Extrude with no bevel. 3D Effect builds a 3D model of that, and then renders it as a group of flat, 2D paths. So far, so good.
But now you apply 3D Extrude again. By doing that, you've just told Illustrator to apply 3D Extrude to each of those flat 2D paths that make up the rendering of the first extrusion. You are not adding a combination of two 3D transformations, one being the extrusion and the other being a rotation. Even if it did finish rendering, the result would be a hideous mess, not at all what you are expecting it to be.
Your example looks simple, and it would be for any full-featured 3D modeler, and even for Adobe Dimensions, which is what AI's 3D Effect is based on. But AI's 3D Effect is a very dumbed-down subset of that functionality. It is merely AI's long belated answer to the cheezy simple headline extrusions that are common in every cheap drawing program, and even in Office applications. It's technically better than those in ways particular to vector drawing in a Bezier drawing environment, but it's still really just intended for the simplest 3D transformations: Simple extrusions, lathes, and planar rotations of a headline or image; and a limited ability to map artwork onto the resulting surfaces.
Your example requires each text character outline to be extruded (which 3D Effect can do), while also orienting each of those extrusions individually and differently within the same 3D coordinate system (which it can't).
You could very tedously fake the construct you are trying to build by actually extruding and rotating each and every character outline individually, then simply arranging and stacking them on the page so as to merely look like it is one model. But you simply cannot have multiple objects at different XYZ orientations in a slingle model in AI's 3D Effect. That's the debilitating limitation that anyone familiar with its predicessor, Adobe Dimensions, have been complaining about in this forum ever since 3D Effect appeared.
JET