Help with text not being editable after applying effects

[hobbesedits]

Hi, I’m relatively new to Illustrator and I’m following this tutorial here which shows how to do a text effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBNFKsZvl9M

It involves transforming text using the envelope distort, shear, extrude and bevel then expand appearance commands. In the video it looks like, after doing these steps, the object is still a text object, allowing him to edit parts of it individually. But as soon as I do the envelope distort step my text seems to turn into an image and I can’t select individual parts of it anymore. So I'm unable to do anything he does after 3:10 because I can't select individual parts of the text. As you can see below as well, Illustrator seems to recognise it as one image after I do these steps:

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong here?

Thanks!

[Ton Frederiks]

Object > Envelope Distort > Edit Contents

[hobbesedits]

That doesn't seem to work unfortunately. It's less that I want to edit the text, more that I want to be able to click on elements in the finished 3D text, like the tops and bottoms of the letters, like he does in the video. But this doesn't seem to work for me since it just becomes an image file. Wondering if this is something to do with the fact that I'm using the 2022 version of Illustrator and not the 2021 one the video creator is using.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

If you want to edit the paths, you hjave to expand appearance first.

In order to get the paths as expected, you the 3D effects from the "Classic" submenu

[hobbesedits]

Thank you! This worked for me