How to set surface transparency based on value in Matlab? - matlab

I am plotting a surface and I want to add transparancy based upon the value of z2. Namely, if z2 = max(z2), the transparency is 0 and when z2 = min(z2), the transparency is 1. How can I do this?
h=surf(x2,y2,z2);
set(h, 'EdgeColor','none', 'FaceColor','interp', 'FaceLighting','gouraud')

I actually just figured out how to do this for a little application I was developing. I will include a working example of the code which varies the transparency of a simple surface based upon the value of z at the points. The key part of the code is where you are specifying 'AlphaData', which allows you to dynamically change the transparency of the surface however you want.
[x,y] = meshgrid([-2:.2:2]);
z = x.*exp(-x.^2-y.^2);
figure
hold on
colormap jet
surf(x,y,z,'FaceAlpha','flat',...
'AlphaDataMapping','none',...
'AlphaData',abs(z),'Edgecolor','None')
set(gcf,'position',[350,0,900,900])
view([45,20])
grid on
colorbar ```

Related

How can I make a 3D object have different color front and back faces

Is it possible to make a 3D object have different colors on each side (front and back faces one side of an object one color like red and another side another color like blue) using surf?
%example
[x y] = meshgrid(-1:0.1:1); % Generate x and y data
z = zeros(size(x, 1)); % Generate z data
surf(x, y, z, 'FaceColor', 'red') % Plot the surface
How can I make the other side of the surf object another color like blue? Is this possible?
I'm using Octave 5.1 which is similar to Matlab
OpenGL is used by virtually every computer to draw stuff in the screen, and so does MATLAB (and Octave AFAIK). As MATLAB uses OpenGL primitives to plot things on screen, you can not do whatever a OpenGL primitive can not do, e.g. drawing a primitive with different color in each side. With this understanding, the conclusion is that to do what you want, you need to plot the surface twice.
surf(x, y, z, 'FaceColor', 'red') % Plot the surface
hold on
surf(x, y, z-z*0.001, 'FaceColor', 'blue') % Plot the surface

MATLAB - Plotting a smooth volume from 3D scatter plot data

So I have data in the form [x y z intensity] that I plot on a scatter3 figure with xyz axes. The colour of the data is used to dictate the intensity value. Problem is, using a scatter plot means the data points show up as discrete points. What I need, is a smooth shape - so I guess I need some kind of interpolation between the points?
I've tried using trisurf, but the problem with this one is that it interpolates between points that it shouldn't. So where I should have 'gaps' in my surface, it joins up the edges instead so it fills in the gaps. See the attached pics for clarification.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
The code I use is as below (the commented out scatter3 is what does the scatter plot, the rest does the trisurf):
% Read in data
dataM = csvread('3dDispersion.csv');
% scatter3(dataM(:,1), dataM(:,2), dataM(:,3), 5, dataM(:,4),'filled');
% Plot
hold on;
x = dataM(:,1);
y = dataM(:,2);
freq = dataM(:,3);
tri = delaunay(x,y);
h = trisurf(tri, x, y, freq);
% Make it pretty
% view(-45,30);
view(3);
axis vis3d;
lighting phong;
shading interp;
Use the boundary function in Matlab. This will apply a mesh similar to shrinkwrap over your points. In order to reduce the "gap closers", you will want to increase the "shrink factor".
Try K = boundary(X,Y,Z,0.9)
Where X, Y & Z are the vectors of your data points
https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/boundary.html
You can then use trimesh or related surface plotting functions depending on how you want to display it.

Matlab: How can I control the color of a streamtube plot?

I am currently trying to plot 3D streamtubes. I want the tubes to be colored corresponding to their respective velocity (e.g. slow = blue, fast = red).
To be more exact, I have three 3D-matrices containing the velocity in x, y and z direction. The color of the streamtubes should be sqrt(vx^2+vy^2+vz^2). When using streamtube(x,y,z,vx,vy,vz,sx,sy,sz) the tubes are colored according to their z-coordinate which is useless because it's a 3D plot anyway.
Well this wasn't easy (it ought to be a builtin option), but by modifying the CData of each tube (they are each their own graphics object), you can achieve the desired result. Here's an example
load wind
[sx,sy,sz] = meshgrid(80,20:10:50,0:5:15);
h=streamtube(x,y,z,u,v,w,sx,sy,sz);
drawnow
view(3)
axis tight
shading interp;
This gives this picture:
but then doing this:
vel=sqrt(u.^2+v.^2+w.^2); %// calculate velocities
for i=1:length(h)
%// Modify the colour data of each tube
set(h(i),'CData',interp3(x,y,z,vel,get(h(i),'XData')...
,get(h(i),'YData'),get(h(i),'ZData'),'spline'))
end
drawnow
view(3)
axis tight
shading interp;
gives this result
NOTES:
1) I don't know if this is fully correct, I don't know how to test it
2) You have to interpolate the velocity data from the points where it's known onto the vertices of the streamtubes
3) I found the spline interpolation option to work best, but the other options might work better in other cases

How can I make a "color map" plot in matlab?

I have some data (a function of two parameters) stored in a matlab format, and I'd like to use matlab to plot it. Once I read the data in, I use mesh() to make a plot. My mesh() plot gives me the the value of the function as a color and a surface height, like this:
What matlab plotting function should I use to make a 2D mesh plot where the dependent variable is represented as only a color? I'm looking for something like pm3d map in gnuplot.
By default mesh will color surface values based on the (default) jet colormap (i.e. hot is higher). You can additionally use surf for filled surface patches and set the 'EdgeColor' property to 'None' (so the patch edges are non-visible).
[X,Y] = meshgrid(-8:.5:8);
R = sqrt(X.^2 + Y.^2) + eps;
Z = sin(R)./R;
% surface in 3D
figure;
surf(Z,'EdgeColor','None');
2D map: You can get a 2D map by switching the view property of the figure
% 2D map using view
figure;
surf(Z,'EdgeColor','None');
view(2);
... or treating the values in Z as a matrix, viewing it as a scaled image using imagesc and selecting an appropriate colormap.
% using imagesc to view just Z
figure;
imagesc(Z);
colormap jet;
The color pallet of the map is controlled by colormap(map), where map can be custom or any of the built-in colormaps provided by MATLAB:
Update/Refining the map: Several design options on the map (resolution, smoothing, axis etc.) can be controlled by the regular MATLAB options. As #Floris points out, here is a smoothed, equal-axis, no-axis labels maps, adapted to this example:
figure;
surf(X, Y, Z,'EdgeColor', 'None', 'facecolor', 'interp');
view(2);
axis equal;
axis off;
gevang's answer is great. There's another way as well to do this directly by using pcolor. Code:
[X,Y] = meshgrid(-8:.5:8);
R = sqrt(X.^2 + Y.^2) + eps;
Z = sin(R)./R;
figure;
subplot(1,3,1);
pcolor(X,Y,Z);
subplot(1,3,2);
pcolor(X,Y,Z); shading flat;
subplot(1,3,3);
pcolor(X,Y,Z); shading interp;
Output:
Also, pcolor is flat too, as show here (pcolor is the 2d base; the 3d figure above it is generated using mesh):
Note that both pcolor and "surf + view(2)" do not show the last row and the last column of your 2D data.
On the other hand, using imagesc, you have to be careful with the axes. The surf and the imagesc examples in gevang's answer only (almost -- apart from the last row and column) correspond to each other because the 2D sinc function is symmetric.
To illustrate these 2 points, I produced the figure below with the following code:
[x, y] = meshgrid(1:10,1:5);
z = x.^3 + y.^3;
subplot(3,1,1)
imagesc(flipud(z)), axis equal tight, colorbar
set(gca, 'YTick', 1:5, 'YTickLabel', 5:-1:1);
title('imagesc')
subplot(3,1,2)
surf(x,y,z,'EdgeColor','None'), view(2), axis equal tight, colorbar
title('surf with view(2)')
subplot(3,1,3)
imagesc(flipud(z)), axis equal tight, colorbar
axis([0.5 9.5 1.5 5.5])
set(gca, 'YTick', 1:5, 'YTickLabel', 5:-1:1);
title('imagesc cropped')
colormap jet
As you can see the 10th row and 5th column are missing in the surf plot. (You can also see this in images in the other answers.)
Note how you can use the "set(gca, 'YTick'..." (and Xtick) command to set the x and y tick labels properly if x and y are not 1:1:N.
Also note that imagesc only makes sense if your z data correspond to xs and ys are (each) equally spaced. If not you can use surf (and possibly duplicate the last column and row and one more "(end,end)" value -- although that's a kind of a dirty approach).
I also suggest using contourf(Z). For my problem, I wanted to visualize a 3D histogram in 2D, but the contours were too smooth to represent a top view of histogram bars.
So in my case, I prefer to use jucestain's answer. The default shading faceted of pcolor() is more suitable.
However, pcolor() does not use the last row and column of the plotted matrix. For this, I used the padarray() function:
pcolor(padarray(Z,[1 1],0,'post'))
Sorry if that is not really related to the original post

Fixing the Radial Axis on MATLAB Polar Plots

I'm using polar plots (POLAR(THETA,RHO)) in MATLAB.
Is there an easy way to fix the range for the radial axis to say, 1.5?
I'm looking for something analogous to the xlim, ylim commands for cartesian axes. Haven't found anything in the docs yet.
this worked for me... i wanted the radius range to go to 30, so i first plotted this
polar(0,30,'-k')
hold on
and then plotted what i was actually interested in. this first plotted point is hidden behind the grid marks. just make sure to include
hold off
after your final plotting command.
Here's how I was able to do it.
The MATLAB polar plot (if you look at the Handle Graphics options available) does not have anything like xlim or ylim. However, I realized that the first thing plotted sets the range, so I was able to plot a function with radius range [-.5 .5] on a [-1 1] plot as follows:
theta = linspace(0,2*pi,100);
r = sin(2*theta) .* cos(2*theta);
r_max = 1;
h_fake = polar(theta,r_max*ones(size(theta)));
hold on;
h = polar(theta, r);
set(h_fake, 'Visible', 'Off');
That doesn't look very good and hopefully there's a better way to do it, but it works.
Simple solution is to make a fake graph and set its color to white.
fake=100;
polar(0,fake,'w');
hold on;
real=10;
polar(0,real,'w');
In case anyone else comes across this, here's the solution:
As Scottie T and gnovice pointed out, Matlab basically uses the polar function as an interface for standard plots, but with alot of formatting behind the scenes to make it look polar. Look at the values of the XLim and YLim properties of a polar plot and you'll notice that they are literally the x and y limits of your plot in Cartesian coordinates. So, to set a radius limit, use xlim and ylim, or axis, and be smart about the values you set:
rlim = 10;
axis([-1 1 -1 1]*rlim);
...that's all there is to it. Happy Matlabbing :)