If you tear on the curve, the object follows the envelope. There are many different forms of envelopes. In the sample above you see an envelope that was orig-inally a rectangle made of bezier segments. You will not notice because you know what it should read. The extrusion tool adds a 3D effect to objects.
Extrusion includes several parameters like bevel, color and lighting options.
It is not trivial to get a good looking picture, but when you take some time to play with different light and color settings, you should be able to get a decent 3D text. Shadow The easy way to make an object look like it is floating above the ground is to add a shadow. With the interactive shadow tool this is a matter of a few seconds. Okay, maybe minutes until you get it the way you want it to look. The shadow tool did not look very intuitive to me because I needed to draw a very long line just to create a small offset, but once you understand the way it works you can easily control all the options.