Plot 3D Color Line

Plots a 3D line with color encoding along the length using the patch function.

Description

This function plots a 3D line (x,y,z) encoded with scalar color data (c). This function is an improvement over the CLINE function previously made available on TMW File Exchange. Rather than using the LINE function a PATCH surface is generated. This provides a way to change the colormapping because the surface patches use indexed colors rather than true colors. Hence changing the COLORMAP or CAXIS of the figure will change the colormapping of the patch object.

DEMO: clinep;

SYNTAX: h=clinep(x,y,z[,c,W]);

INPUTS:
x - mx1 vector of x-position data
   y - mx1 vector of y-position data
   z - mx1 vector of z-position data

 -OPTIONAL INPUTS-

   c - mx1 vector of index color-data (uses current colormap or DEFAULT)
   W - 1x1 specifies the line thickness (DEFAULT is 3)

OUTPUT:
  
   h - Graphics handle to the patch object.

DBE 2005/09/29

P.S. The code is modified from code that generates a 3D tube, rather than a line, but that needs more work still.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
cline.m

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7 (R14)
• Other requirements: None that I know of.

[sas fgagfsg]

eysrr

[anon anon]

 

[riki vela]

muy bueno, gracias

[Neil King]

This is great! Just what i was after. Thanks

[Peter Gurk]

The idea is good, but performance is unacceptable (slow)

[Felix Huang]

Are cylinder commands really necessary? This is a high performance way to get a color mapped line of zero thickness:

y=patch([q1; q1(end:-1:1)], [q2; q2(end:-1:1)], [[1:length(q1)], [length(q1):-1:1]] ,'EdgeCo', 'none');

[rose Campbell]

Thanks very useful!

[John McArthur]

With vector color data (input arg 'c') it seems to divide up the line into 3rds. This is on 2008b

Any thoughts?

[Nikola Toljic]

Thanks.

[Julien]

Wrong window, sorry ...