Surface Settings

Blend Type Section

Blend Mode box: Select how the front and matte clips or the front and back clips are combined. See Surface Blending Modes.

Transparency field: Displays the transparency of the image. Enter 0 for a completely opaque image, or 100 for a completely transparent image.

Shape box: Select a shape for the selected surface. For Stereo Objects, you are limited to using a Flat surface. See Changing the Shape of a Surface.

Surface Resolution field: Displays the geometry resolution of the selected surface. By default, the value is equal to the default Action Resolution setting (in the Rendering section of the Setup menu).
The lower the value, the better the resolution and the greater the processing time required to interact with the image. For example, a value of 1 on an NTSC image creates a mesh with 720 horizontal and 486 vertical subdivisions on the selected surface, affording accurate displacement, normals, and lighting.

Auto Expand button: Enable to automatically resize the surface when an attached diffuse map's Axis settings are changed. Only available for Flat surfaces, and when a diffuse map is parented from the surface. Always available for stereo objects.

Flip Normals button: Enable to flip the selected surface normals to light the back side of a surface.

Force 2-Sided button: Enable to have lights in the scene light both sides of the surface (when shading is turned on).

Surface Offset X field: Defines the level of offset for a surface along the X axis. Editable.

Surface Offset Y field: Defines the level of offset for a surface along the Y axis. Editable.

Shadow Casting box: Select how the selected image object will be affected by a Shadow Cast object in the scene. See Surface and Geometry Shadow Casters .

Shine field: Displays the level of shine for the specular highlights (there are no specular highlights when Shine is set to 0). Editable.

Lighting box: Select Ambient or Diffuse lighting so that the surface can reflect incidental light. See Applying Incidental Light Reflection.

Specular Highlights colour pot: Displays the colour of the surface highlights. Editable.
The specular highlight is visible only if Shading is enabled in the Setup menu and if shine is greater than 0. See Adjusting Specular Highlights.

Diffuse colour pot: Displays the diffuse colour. If Diffuse is selected in the Lighting box, the Ambient colour takes on the same shade as the selected Diffuse colour. Editable.

Ambient colour pot: Displays the ambient colour. Available when Ambient is selected in the Lighting box. Editable.

Filter box

Select the type of filtering to apply to the surface.

Select:	To apply:
Nearest	No filtering — the pixel of the texture closest to the screen pixel is displayed.
Linear	Basic bilinear filtering.
Anisotropic	Non-proportional filtering between X and Y (faster to process than EWA, but with a lesser quality).
Aniso+Linear	A combination of Anisotropic and Linear filtering.
EWA	A high-quality elliptical weighted average filter to produce enhanced rendering results (slower to process than other filters).
EWA+Linear	A combination of EWA and Linear filtering (offers the most advanced filter processing).

Wireframe button: Enable to convert the selected surface to a wireframe representation (lighting and transparency properties are kept).

Motion Blur button: Enable to use motion blur for the selected surface (can only be used if the global Motion Blur is enabled in the Action Setup menu).