Hi Homies…
Generally I’ve always filled a shape with a pattern in Illustrator (cs3) and then shaded it in Photoshop or just made a gradient. However, I’m looking to shade and form the pattern within Illustrator and this envelope distort method looks very interesting. I followed SKINNY’S advice but got stuck with the bounding box around the shape. Also there are several different options within the ‘envelope distort’ tool and I’m not sure which to use. I played around with a few but didn’t see anything even close to the results I’m looking for. Any further guidance would be much appreciated. 
-B
p.s. For more clarification; I’m trying to figure out how to distort the pattern fill but not necessarily the shape. (i.e. placing a pattern on an upper pattern piece but of course, the pattern wouldn’t naturally appear flat, so it would need some ‘depth’ to it- shading and/or pattern dimension change).