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Figure 1: The raw model with no textures or surfacing work done.
Figure 2: The raytraced binoculars with all texturing work completed.
Surfacing, or texturing, is the art of making your model look like something other than a mass of gray polygons. Texturing transforms your model into something recognizable in the real world. At the left is an example of the difference surfacing can make.
Surfacing is accomplished with a variety of different methods and tools. Various 3D applications have various ways of accomplishing the same tasks.
When you "surface" something, you are assigning things like the color, how shiney or dull it is, how refelctive it is, etc. If an object has decals or stickers, such as the "passed" sticker on the binoculars at left, there are a variety of ways of putting that sticker on the binoculars in exactly the right shape and position.
Much surfacing work is accomplished within the 3D application itself. Much of the surfacing work is also created in an image manipulation program like Adobe Photoshop. In Photoshop, you would create the "passed" sticker, save it as an image file, then wrap the image file onto the model.
In the figure 2 there's a slight bumpy, un-shiney texture applied to the main body of the binoculars. There is also a shiney, hard glass texture applied to the lenses, a black, shiney plastic texture to other portions of the housing, and a dull, matte finish applied to the inside of the binocular hoods, etc. Each of these textures (or surfaces) requires its own set of parameters.
Smoothing is also applied in the surfacing attributes. If you enlarge figure 1 you can see faceted polygonal lines around the hoods of the binoculars. This is no smoothing applied to it. When you enlarge figure 2, you can see that smoothing eliminates these faceted lines.
Surfacing and lighting are inexorably linked: that is to say, how light in the scene interacts with the textures you create. How a surface is lit can have a dramatic affect on the overall final look of that surface, hence the object.
Without this work, your model would look like the gray mass of shapes in figure 1.
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