The command surfcolor does not color surfaces. Commands that color surfaces include color, scolor, rainbow, rangecolor, and coulombic.
Instead, surfcolor sets the color source (effectively the level at which coloring is defined) of a molecular surface to byatom or bymodel. The color of the surface will not necessarily match the color of the items at the same level, since at each level the “self” and surface color assignments may differ (see coloring hierarchy). If no model_number is supplied, all open models will be affected. The model_number(s) should be preceded by #, as in a normal atom specification.
The color source is normally byatom unless changed explicitly or as a side effect of custom coloring (for example, with scolor). Surface color source can also be set in the molecular surface attributes panel.
See also: modelcolor, surface, setattr, coloring