1. All MATLAB® Plot Types
  2. surf

MATLAB - surf

Create Surface Plot

Create three matrices of the same size. Then plot them as a surface. The surface plot uses Z for both height and color.

  [X,Y] = meshgrid(1:0.5:10,1:20);
Z = sin(X) + cos(Y);
surf(X,Y,Z)
fig2plotly()

Specify Colormap Colors for Surface Plot

Specify the colors for a surface plot by including a fourth matrix input, C. The surface plot uses Z for height and C for color. Specify the colors using a colormap, which uses single numbers to stand for colors on a spectrum. When you use a colormap, C is the same size as Z. Add a color bar to the graph to show how the data values in C correspond to the colors in the colormap.

  [X,Y] = meshgrid(1:0.5:10,1:20);
Z = sin(X) + cos(Y);
C = X.*Y;
surf(X,Y,Z,C)
colorbar
fig2plotly()

Specify True Colors for Surface Plot

Specify the colors for a surface plot by including a fourth matrix input, CO. The surface plot uses Z for height and CO for color. Specify the colors using truecolor, which uses triplets of numbers to stand for all possible colors. When you use truecolor, if Z is m-by-n, then CO is m-by-n-by-3. The first page of the array indicates the red component for each color, the second page indicates the green component, and the third page indicates the blue component.

  [X,Y,Z] = peaks(25);
CO(:,:,1) = zeros(25); % red
CO(:,:,2) = ones(25).*linspace(0.5,0.6,25); % green
CO(:,:,3) = ones(25).*linspace(0,1,25); % blue
surf(X,Y,Z,CO)
fig2plotly()

Modify Surface Plot Appearance

Create a semitransparent surface by specifying the FaceAlpha name-value pair with 0.5 as the value. To allow further modifications, assign the surface object to the variable s. 

  [X,Y] = meshgrid(-5:.5:5);
Z = Y.*sin(X) - X.*cos(Y);
s = surf(X,Y,Z,'FaceAlpha',0.5)
fig2plotly()

  
s = 
  Surface with properties:

       EdgeColor: [0 0 0]
       LineStyle: '-'
       FaceColor: 'flat'
    FaceLighting: 'flat'
       FaceAlpha: 0.5000
           XData: [21x21 double]
           YData: [21x21 double]
           ZData: [21x21 double]
           CData: [21x21 double]

  Show all properties



fig2plotly()

Use s to access and modify properties of the surface object after it is created. For example, hide the edges by setting the EdgeColor property. 

  s.EdgeColor = 'none';
fig2plotly()