Creating a video from a set of 3D plots - matlab

Question

I used a function called ind2patch to make a 3D block which contains a number of smaller blocks in 3 dimensions. Each small block has a value that is represented by a color. A typical plot is like this one:
Now I would like to show the evolution of values (i.e. the color) with time of these small blocks using a video. I have data at different moments but I only know how to plot the graphs at different time by reading different files. Is there a way to combine the plots to a video or directly plot the graphs in the form of video?
Here is my code:
clear; close all; clc;
fig = figure(1);
set (fig, 'Units', 'normalized', 'Position', [0,0,1,1]);
fig_color='w'; fig_colordef='white';
cMap=jet(256);
faceAlpha1=1;
faceAlpha2=0.65;
edgeColor1='none';
edgeColor2='none';
NumBoxX=100;%box number in x direction
NumBoxY=100;%box number in y direction
NumBoxZ=5;%box number in z direction
fid = fopen('rho 20950.dat','r');
datacell = textscan(fid, '%f%f%f%f%f%f%f%f');
fclose(fid);
all_data = cell2mat(datacell);
M=zeros(NumBoxX,NumBoxY,NumBoxZ);
for i=1:NumBoxX
for j=1:NumBoxY
for k=1:NumBoxZ
num=k+NumBoxZ*(j-1)+NumBoxZ*NumBoxY*(i-1);
M(i,j,k)=all_data(num,4);
end
end
end
indPatch=1:numel(M);
[F,V,C]=ind2patch(indPatch,M,'v');
title('\sigma_{xy} in different cells','fontsize',20);
xlabel('y','fontsize',20);ylabel('x','fontsize',20); zlabel('z','fontsize',20); hold on;
set(get(gca,'xlabel'),'Position',[5 -50 30]);
set(get(gca,'ylabel'),'Position',[5 50 -15]);
set(get(gca,'zlabel'),'Position',[64 190 -60]);
patch('Faces',F,'Vertices',V,'FaceColor','flat','CData',C,'EdgeColor','k','FaceAlpha',0.5);
axis equal; view(3); axis tight; axis vis3d; grid off;
colormap(cMap); caxis([min(M(:)) max(M(:))]);
cb = colorbar;
set(get(cb,'title'),'string','Stress (MPa)','fontsize',20);
lbpos = get(cb,'title'); % get the handle of the colorbar title
%set(lbpos,'Units','data');% change Units to data
%pos = get (lbpos,'position'); % get position of the colorbar title
set(lbpos,'units','normalized','position',[0,1.04]);
MyAxes=gca;
set(MyAxes,'Units','Normalized','position',[0.05,0.1,0.8,0.8]);
zoom(1.85);

Answer 1

You could do something like this:
Loop through each patch and grab an image of it.
Insert the images into a matrix
Convert the image matrix into a movie using immovie
% // Create a matrix to hold your images
A = zeros(row,col,numOfColours, numOfFrames);
where row is the number of rows and col is the number of columns in one image.
Loop through your patches and create a video of the individual images.
for n=1:numOfPatches
imshow(patches(:,:,n)) % // display the image
frame = getframe(gcf) % // get the current figure window
im = frame2im(frame); % // convert it to an image
A(:,:,1:3,n) = im; % // Insert the image into the matrix
end
The you can use immovie to convert it to a movie
mov = immovie(RGB);
movie(mov); % // play the movie