Joining anchors on outlines?

[Virág26461792wi24]

Hello, so I'm pretty new to illustrator and couldn't find any tutorial on how to do what I intended

(and I know I'm just clicking about like an idiot but hey 😅...)

I'm trying to make a 3D font which has outlines. The shadow parts should be different colors, something like this but...looking good 😄 (I botched it together then tried to scale the whole thing up as a group. Looks horrible, I know.)

I typed my text and gave it an outline, then I duplicated it, changed the color of the font in the back to black and placed it where I want the end of my shadow to be.

I used a youtube tutorial on how to make a 3D effect on my font with the transform tool in the appearance window. Afterwards, I tried several things (create outlines,convert to shape, expand what have you) to connect the two anchor points you can see on the screenshots but I get the "The selected objects cannot be joined as they are invalid objects (Compound paths, closed paths...)" error message. When I draw a line with the pen tool and try to connect the anchor points, it says "To join, you mus select two end points of the same or two different paths"..as I basically have no end point in my font-to-outline object.

What would you do to finish the task as uncomplicatedly and fast as possible?

Thanks in advance for your help!

[Monika Gause]

"The transform tool" - are you referring to the Transform effect?

If so, you will have a lot of issues in your font. The transform effect creates the actual number of copies as paths. So you will have a gazillion paths in your font. A font should rather be optimized. So it will be better to actually draw those shapes. I mean you can try and first "Expand appearance" and then Unite the resulting shapes with the Pathfinder panel. But still there will be a lot to optimize and clean up afterwards.

And since you need to do a complete alphabet of shadowed letters, you might check out this (commercial third party) plugin it can create block shadows in no time: https://astutegraphics.com/plugins/stylism

[Virág26461792wi24]

Yes, sorry, I meant the effect.

Thanks for the tip, but sadly the plugin can't help me as I'm working on a corporate laptop and can't run it 😞 

[Monika Gause]

The transform effect will leave you with this problem instead:

So when you cannot use the plugin, then you either need to expand the effect and then clean up the result. Or you do not use the effect at all and instead draw the shapes.

The error message you are seeing is most probably caused by the effect being still live.

[Met1]

Did you look at this:

https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/using/create-3D-text.html

?