Action uses shaders to compute the colour, lighting, shadows, and other attributes of each pixel or vertex of objects in the scene. Shaders use the processing pipeline of the GPU to accelerate object-specific rendering effects. You can use shaders to control the interaction between surfaces or models and the lights in the scene to contribute to the realism of a material simulated in a texture.

You can use any media to map textures to Action surfaces and geometries, thus adding detail such as depth and reflections to your 3D composites.