I think what you want is the “color zone” command: 

color zone #10 near sel distance 3

... will cause each triangle on the surface to be coloured according to the colour of the nearest atom in the selection within a 3Å cutoff distance.

On 27 Jul 2020, at 14:48, Oleksiy Kovtun <okovtun@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

Dear ChimeraX community, 

I need to colour the surface by selected side chains to highlight an intermolecular contact.

The command sequence:
#select atoms on the buried surface. The selection works correctly: 
measure buriedarea #10/C:449-end withAtoms2 #9/A:449-end select true

#make a surface. A new surface #10.1 is generated:
surface #10/C resolution 7 

#color surface yellow at selected residues.
color #10 & sel yellow target s

The last command does not result in surface colouring although reports "colored 1 surfaces" upon its execution. 

Where is a mistake in the colouring approach?
I run chimeraX version 1.0 (2020-06-04) on Ubuntu 18.04.

Thank you and best regards. 
Oleksiy

Dr Oleksiy Kovtun
Research Fellow
Briggs group
MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
Francis Crick Avenue
Cambridge
CB2 0QH
UK

Tel: + 44 1223 267551
Email: okovtun@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk

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