Envelope Distort

[Moon22]

I have been trying to envelope distort with top object with a moderately complicated object and it's been driving me crazy. I have tried envelope distort with top object, creating a mesh by selecting points on the object with the direct selection tool, etc. I have also gone to envelope options and turned off distort appearance (also played around with fidelity and the other options as well).

I have gotten close to the result I want with "envelope with warp" and "fish." I could do some adjusting and get by with the fish and work on manually distorting it into what I want, but at this point I need to figure it out more out of spite and frustration.

I trolled so many forums and youtube videos, but no one seems to be having this issue. I am relatively new to illustrator and especially envelope distort, so perhaps I just don't understand how to use it. But everyone else doesn't seem to have the same issue.

To explain it to the best of my ability - it seems like the mesh is making it very complicated and three dimensional in comparison to the warp and fish option which looks more 2d of a warp.

Attached are a few pictures to help explain. Appreciate any help!

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[Moon22]

Apologies, I added captions to the photos but I am not sure how anyone would see them. 

1st pic is the envelope with warp - fish option.

2nd pic is what happens when I try to use envelope distort with top object with the text (tried it with live text, and with create outlines text)

3rd pic is the shape i am trying to use as the object

4th pic is the custom mesh i created by selecting a few points with the direct selection tool and the mesh was created automatically like this in a 4x4 form. I have also tried adjusting these points so the lines aren't so curved but it did not help much.

[Monika Gause]

That shape probably won't work, there are just too many flukes. At its heart, a mesh is a table (like in Excel).

You need to either draw it completely manually.

Or maybe try and further adjust the first one that you initially did with the automatic distort.