Surfaces behave like smart groups that mask and warp content placed inside of them to match the real-world scene.

Surfaces simplify the content creation process for complex real-world scenes through an entirely 2D workflow. Content creation in Lightform Creator is powered by the Smart Scan image and user-defined Surfaces.

Content such as images, videos, and effects, all live within a Surface layer.

This allows users to quickly augment or add digital content to pixels that have been aligned and perspectively corrected without needing to use 3D tools or create a 3D model of the scene beforehand.

How to create Surfaces

In most content creation software, content and objects are often created in arbitrary positions based on the user's preference and masks are optional. In projected augmented reality, the position and orientation of content are predetermined by the scene being augmented.

In Lightform Creator, you create surfaces on top of the Scan Image and then apply content to the surface. Surfaces are created using any of the Surface Tools:

• Pen Tool
• Shape Tool
• Magic Wand
• Magic Brush
• Brush

By creating a surface, you are in effect, masking out a part of the real world that you’d like to augment. Masks indicate the regions where content should be projected in a scene.

Reusing Surfaces across Slides

When one Surface is created, it is reusable on every Slide in the project. Unique content can be added to the same Surface on every individual Slide.

If you modify a Surface, it applies globally to every slide. We designed slides to work in this way to make adjusting the content in your scene much more efficient.

How to modify Surfaces

See the following articles for more information on transforming Surfaces

• Editing Surfaces
• Moving Surfaces
• Changing the perspective of content in Surfaces
• Duplicating Surfaces
• Splitting & Merging Surfaces