Drawing a surface with x,y,z points - matlab

I have a list of x, y, z in this form:
-0.2894 1.2835 0.5405
-0.8171 -0.3034 0.1824
2.7864 0.5506 0.0037
I could plot using plot3(x,y,z, '*') and it works fine.
Now I would like to draw a surface, but when I do:
>> surf(x,y,z)
??? Error using ==> surf at 78
Z must be a matrix, not a scalar or vector.
How should I draw it?

I suggest you do a Delaunay triangulation of the x,y values, and then use z as height for a surface plot:
x = randn(100,1);
y = randn(100,1);
z = (exp(-x.^2-y.^2));
tri = delaunay(x,y);
trisurf(tri,x,y,z)
EDIT
Since you seem to have problems with your Matlab version, here's an alternative: use griddata to interpolate your data onto a regular grid, so that you can use surf for plotting.
x = randn(100,1);
y = randn(100,1);
z = (exp(-x.^2-y.^2));
[xx,yy]=meshgrid(-2:0.1:2,-2:0.1:2);
zz = griddata(x,y,z,xx,yy);
dfig,surf(xx,yy,zz)

Related

Extracting Z values after 3D plot is generated by 2D curve revolution with repmat

I am stuck with an apparently simple problem. I have to revolve of 360° a 2D curve around an axis, to obtain a 3D plot. Say, I want to do it with this sine function:
z = sin(r);
theta = 0:pi/20:2*pi;
xx = bsxfun(#times,r',cos(theta));
yy = bsxfun(#times,r',sin(theta));
zz = repmat(z',1,length(theta));
surf(xx,yy,zz)
axis equal
I now want to visualize the numerical values of the Z plane, stored in a matrix. I would normally do it this way:
ch=get(gca,'children')
X=get(ch,'Xdata')
Y=get(ch,'Ydata')
Z=get(ch,'Zdata')
If I visualize Z with
imagesc(Z)
I don't obtain the actual values of Z of the plot, but the "un-revolved" projection. I suspect that this is related to the way I generate the curve, and from the fact I don't have a function of the type
zz = f(xx,yy)
Is there any way I can obtain the grid values of xx and yy, as well as the values of zz at each gridpoint?
Thank you for your help.
Instead of bsxfun you can use meshgrid:
% The two parameters needed for the parametric equation
h = linspace(0,2) ;
th = 0:pi/20:2*pi ;
[R,T] = meshgrid(h,th) ;
% The parametric equation
% f(x) Rotation along Z
% ↓ ↓
X = sin(R) .* cos(T) ;
Y = sin(R) .* sin(T) ;
% Z = h
Z = R ;
surf(X,Y,Z,'EdgeColor',"none")
xlabel('X')
ylabel('Y')
zlabel('Z')
Which produce:
And if you want to extract the contour on the X plane (X = 0) you can use contour:
contour(Y,Z,X,[0,0])
Which produce:

How to plot using surf gird in 2D using function value

if the function F is available it is easy to draw surf plot i.e.
x=1:0.1:4;
y=1:0.1:4;
[X,Y]=meshgrid(x,y);
Z=sin(X).^2+cos(Y).^2;
surf(X,Y,Z);
view(2) ;
in my case I calculated F function using least square:
for example I have x and y vectors
x = [0 9.8312 77.1256 117.9810 99.9979];
y = [0 2754.5 4043.3 5376.3 5050.4];
the linear function of these two vector is define by
F= [1149.73 , 37.63];
therefore the estimation is equal to
z= [ones(5,1) x']*F';
which is
z = [1149.73 1519.67 4051.96 5589.35 4912.65];
and if it is plotted
plot(x,y,'b.');
hold on;plot(x,y,'b-');
hold on; plot(x,z,'-r');
The linear z ( red line) is showing correctly. Now I want to plot it for all possible combination of x and y using grid and I need to have a mesh for all inputs
[X,Y] = meshgrid(x,y);
but how to make the Z matrix to show the intensity plot of function Z? The Z suppose to have high intensity close to z value and less value far from it. I should suppose to get something like this
Thanks
P.S: the F is calculated using pinv (least square).
You have to interpolate the scattered data to plot it on grid. Here is a simple example for your x, y and z vectors
xi=linspace(min(x),max(x),100)
yi=linspace(min(y),max(y),100)
[XI YI]=meshgrid(xi,yi);
ZI = griddata(x,y,z,XI,YI);
contourf(XI,YI,ZI)

Matlab overplot comet3 on a surf graph

I would like to overplot a comet3 plot over a surf plot, is this possible? hold on did not work.
It should work with the appropriate x,y and z values for the surface you are trying to display.
Simple example:
clc
clear
t = -2*pi:pi/100:2*pi;
x = (cos(2*t).^2).*sin(t);
y = (sin(2*t).^2).*cos(t);
%// Create x and y data for the surface plot
[xx,yy] = meshgrid(x,y);
zz = xx.^2 + yy.^2 - 7;
surf(xx,yy,zz)
hold on
comet3(x,y,t);
output:

Interpolate surface of 3D cylinder in Matlab

I have a dataset that describes a point cloud of a 3D cylinder (xx,yy,zz,C):
and I would like to make a surface plot from this dataset, similar to this
In order to do this I thought I could interpolate my scattered data using TriScatteredInterp onto a regular grid and then plot it using surf:
F = TriScatteredInterp(xx,yy,zz);
max_x = max(xx); min_x = min(xx);
max_y = max(yy); min_y = min(yy);
max_z = max(zz); min_z = min(zz);
xi = min_x:abs(stepSize):max_x;
yi = min_y:abs(stepSize):max_y;
zi = min_z:abs(stepSize):max_z;
[qx,qy] = meshgrid(xi,yi);
qz = F(qx,qy);
F = TriScatteredInterp(xx,yy,C);
qc = F(qx,qy);
figure
surf(qx,qy,qz,qc);
axis image
This works really well for convex and concave objects but ends in this for the cylinder:
Can anybody help me as to how to achieve a nicer plot?
Have you tried Delaunay triangulation?
http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/delaunay.html
load seamount
tri = delaunay(x,y);
trisurf(tri,x,y,z);
There is also TriScatteredInterp
http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/triscatteredinterp.html
ti = -2:.25:2;
[qx,qy] = meshgrid(ti,ti);
qz = F(qx,qy);
mesh(qx,qy,qz);
hold on;
plot3(x,y,z,'o');
I think what you are loking for is the Convex hull function. See its documentation.
K = convhull(X,Y,Z) returns the 3-D convex hull of the points (X,Y,Z),
where X, Y, and Z are column vectors. K is a triangulation
representing the boundary of the convex hull. K is of size mtri-by-3,
where mtri is the number of triangular facets. That is, each row of K
is a triangle defined in terms of the point indices.
Example in 2D
xx = -1:.05:1; yy = abs(sqrt(xx));
[x,y] = pol2cart(xx,yy);
k = convhull(x,y);
plot(x(k),y(k),'r-',x,y,'b+')
Use plot to plot the output of convhull in 2-D. Use trisurf or trimesh to plot the output of convhull in 3-D.
A cylinder is the collection of all points equidistant to a line. So you know that your xx, yy and zz data have one thing in common, and that is that they all should lie at an equal distance to the line of symmetry. You can use that to generate a new cylinder (line of symmetry taken to be z-axis in this example):
% best-fitting radius
% NOTE: only works if z-axis is cylinder's line of symmetry
R = mean( sqrt(xx.^2+yy.^2) );
% generate some cylinder
[x y z] = cylinder(ones(numel(xx),1));
% adjust z-range and set best-fitting radius
z = z * (max(zz(:))-min(zz(:))) + min(zz(:));
x=x*R;
y=y*R;
% plot cylinder
surf(x,y,z)
TriScatteredInterp is good for fitting 2D surfaces of the form z = f(x,y), where f is a single-valued function. It won't work to fit a point cloud like you have.
Since you're dealing with a cylinder, which is, in essence, a 2D surface, you can still use TriScatterdInterp if you convert to polar coordinates, and, say, fit radius as a function of angle and height--something like:
% convert to polar coordinates:
theta = atan2(yy,xx);
h = zz;
r = sqrt(xx.^2+yy.^2);
% fit radius as a function of theta and h
RFit = TriScatteredInterp(theta(:),h(:),r(:));
% define interpolation points
stepSize = 0.1;
ti = min(theta):abs(stepSize):max(theta);
hi = min(h):abs(stepSize):max(h);
[qx,qy] = meshgrid(ti,hi);
% find r values at points:
rfit = reshape(RFit(qx(:),qy(:)),size(qx));
% plot
surf(rfit.*cos(qx),rfit.*sin(qx),qy)

Texture mapping in MATLAB

I have points in 3D space and their corresponding 2D image points. How can I make a mesh out of the 3D points, then texture the triangle faces formed by the mesh?
Note that the function trisurf that you were originally trying to use returns a handle to a patch object. If you look at the 'FaceColor' property for patch objects, you can see that there is no 'texturemap' option. That option is only valid for the 'FaceColor' property of surface objects. You will therefore have to find a way to plot your triangular surface as a surface object instead of a patch object. Here are two ways to approach this:
If your data is in a uniform grid...
If the coordinates of your surface data represent a uniform grid such that z is a rectangular set of points that span from xmin to xmax in the x-axis and ymin to ymax in the y-axis, you can plot it using surf instead of trisurf:
Z = ... % N-by-M matrix of data
x = linspace(xmin, xmax, size(Z, 2)); % x-coordinates for columns of Z
y = linspace(ymin, ymax, size(Z, 1)); % y-coordinates for rows of Z
[X, Y] = meshgrid(x, y); % Create meshes for x and y
C = imread('image1.jpg'); % Load RGB image
h = surf(X, Y, Z, flipdim(C, 1), ... % Plot surface (flips rows of C, if needed)
'FaceColor', 'texturemap', ...
'EdgeColor', 'none');
axis equal
In order to illustrate the results of the above code, I initialized the data as Z = peaks;, used the built-in sample image 'peppers.png', and set the x and y values to span from 1 to 16. This resulted in the following texture-mapped surface:
If your data is non-uniformly spaced...
If your data are not regularly spaced, you can create a set of regularly-spaced X and Y coordinates (as I did above using meshgrid) and then use one of the functions griddata or TriScatteredInterp to interpolate a regular grid of Z values from your irregular set of z values. I discuss how to use these two functions in my answer to another SO question. Here's a refined version of the code you posted using TriScatteredInterp (Note: as of R2013a scatteredInterpolant is the recommended alternative):
x = ... % Scattered x data
y = ... % Scattered y data
z = ... % Scattered z data
xmin = min(x);
xmax = max(x);
ymin = min(y);
ymax = max(y);
F = TriScatteredInterp(x(:), y(:), z(:)); % Create interpolant
N = 50; % Number of y values in uniform grid
M = 50; % Number of x values in uniform grid
xu = linspace(xmin, xmax, M); % Uniform x-coordinates
yu = linspace(ymin, ymax, N); % Uniform y-coordinates
[X, Y] = meshgrid(xu, yu); % Create meshes for xu and yu
Z = F(X, Y); % Evaluate interpolant (N-by-M matrix)
C = imread('image1.jpg'); % Load RGB image
h = surf(X, Y, Z, flipdim(C, 1), ... % Plot surface
'FaceColor', 'texturemap', ...
'EdgeColor', 'none');
axis equal
In this case, you have to first choose the values of N and M for the size of your matrix Z. In order to illustrate the results of the above code, I initialized the data for x, y, and z as follows and used the built-in sample image 'peppers.png':
x = rand(1, 100)-0.5; % 100 random values in the range -0.5 to 0.5
y = rand(1, 100)-0.5; % 100 random values in the range -0.5 to 0.5
z = exp(-(x.^2+y.^2)./0.125); % Values from a 2-D Gaussian distribution
This resulted in the following texture-mapped surface:
Notice that there are jagged edges near the corners of the surface. These are places where there were too few points for TriScatteredInterp to adequately fit an interpolated surface. The Z values at these points are therefore nan, resulting in the surface point not being plotted.
If your texture is already in the proper geometry you can just use regular old texture mapping.
The link to the MathWorks documentation of texture mapping:
http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk/help/techdoc/visualize/f0-18164.html#f0-9250
Re-EDIT: Updated the code a little:
Try this approach (I just got it to work).
a=imread('image.jpg');
b=double(a)/255;
[x,y,z]=peaks(30); %# This is a surface maker that you do have
%# The matrix [x,y,z] is the representation of the surface.
surf(x,y,z,b,'FaceColor','texturemap') %# Try this with any image and you
%# should see a pretty explanatory
%# result. (Just copy and paste) ;)
So [x,y,z] is the 'surface' or rather a matrix containing a number of points in the form (x,y,z) that are on the surface. Notice that the image is stretched to fit the surface.