3D text in Maya

We wanted an end credit ala Pixar. 3D words, and our protagonist messing/playing with it.

So we had to import the lettering from either Photoshop or Illustrator. We went with Photoshop as described in the tutorial below:
http://en.9jcg.com/comm_pages/blog_content-art-64.htm

Besides that, we also need to extrude the text. We've used Surfaces: Surfaces--> Loft and Surfaces--> Planar. Then group the each letter together.

However, from the same author, there's another way of doing it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJwNOOmkZuU