You can even do it in Adobe Illustrator and import it into Photoshop

You could try contacting Nik, but as he states it:

"All of the images displayed on the art page were produced primarily in Photoshop, but in some cases have utilised other applications including Illustrator, 3D Studio max, Cinema 4D, Bryce, Poser and Xara 3D."

Illustrator can get you most of the way there, especially if you use a little Gradient Mesh to take the place of some of the standard gradient fills. Photoshop can be used to enhance the Illustrator lettering. Or Photoshop can be used to do all of the colouring, once you have paths created in vector software.

Both methods require 'handwork' though, which can take quite a bit of time depending on the complexity of what you're aiming for. Since this is a special effect more than a stock solution I would think this suitable myself but there are some plugins for both Illustrator and Photoshop I think that can generate 3-dimensional shapes on the fly if you don't want to go the whole hog with something like Maya.

Sketchup is where its at.

http://www.sketchup.com/

If you are on a limited budget, but have time to learn, check out Blender [ http://www.blender.org ]. It's a very full featured open source 3d application. The UI is a little tricky, but it's very fast once you are used to it. Either way, it looks like the 3d app is the smallest part of this work.

There is always this!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOcxz_VNroU
Slow but effective.
Cheers!

It's been such a long time since I've done this. Extreme 3D had a handy function of importing EPS files and using the splines to built its geometry. I think many more modern 3D programs have similar functions, either importing some form of Illustrator curves or handling text as geometry directly, but I don't know which ones.

One thing you might find you have to do is to add points to your curves before exporting The curves generated by the 3D software are not always as supple as in drawing programs, especially when rendering is set in a faster mode. The extra points will give stability to the shapes.

You might want to look into POV-Ray, a free open-source 3D rendering application that's available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

POV-Ray is unusual in that you create scenes not by modeling them in a GUI application, but instead by describing them in a text file using a scene description language (SDL). POV-Ray has direct support for TrueType fonts, so you can render extruded 3D text pretty easily.

For example, here's a scene I threw together in a couple of minutes:

#include "colors.inc"

camera {
location <0, 2, -18>
look_at <0, 0.25, 0>
angle 15
}

light_source {
<500, 500, -1000>
White
}

text {
ttf "frutbd.ttf" "Typophile" 1, 0
pigment { SlateBlue }
translate -2.3 * x
}

This produces the following image:

Note the full alpha transparency. This makes it a snap to drop rendered scenes into Photoshop layers.

Don't be intimidated by the whole SDL thing. If you all you want is simple extruded text, you don't even really have to learn the language. You can just play around with the parameters in the script I posted and see what comes out. Later on, if you're feeling adventurous, you can start to read the documentation at your own pace; eventually, you'll be able to come up with a lot of different cool effects.

I find cinema 4d to be quite effective in conjunction with Illustrator. I'm a student and my course offers no 3d training but I found it quite easy to pick up cinema 4d.

example

Quite an old piece of work now but I think its a good example!?!

Check on Ebay for the King of the 3D type treatments, TYPESTRY from a little company named PIXAR, you get Academy award winning technology at a pretty good price. It has been 15 years since they stopped selling it, but it still is the best.

The Truth shall set you free

Whoa -- I'd all but forgotten about Typestry.

The version I used was a Win16 (Windows 3.x) application. Does it still run on current operating systems?

I have it for Mac, with all the Valis Looks, Glimpse to edit the Looks and MacRenderman, and Showplace, it runs on system 8.1 and 9.22, it is amazing. They made such a great program, the hints are still funny to read after all these years. A funny thing about the program is that they give you concepts in the manual to keep the seams from ripping apart, but it is there where the great unknown of Typestry shines through, in its displacements.

The Truth shall set you free