Color coded 3D scatterplot

Produces a 3D scatterplot of XYZ data with varying colors

Description

A 3D scatter plot of a Cartesian data set is drawn. The data points are sorted by color so that plot3 is called once for each group of points that map to the same color. Execution time is significantly reduced for large data sets. By default the points are colored according to their distance from the XY plane. This can changed with the 'ColorData' property. Additionally the upper and lower limits of the color range can be specified. This is useful for creating a series of plots with the same coloring.

The example plot is produced by the following code.

   figure('color','white');
   [x,y,z] = peaks(101);
   c = gradient(z);
   k = hypot(x,y)<3;
   plot3k({x(k) y(k) z(k)},...
      'ColorData',c(k),'ColorRange',[-0.5 0.5],'Marker',{'o',2},...
      'Labels',{'Peaks','Radius','','Intensity','Lux'},...
      'PlotProps',{'FontSize',12});

Plot3k is based on plot3c by Uli Theune.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
plot3c

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.7 (R2008b)

[oh kwoun]

 

[Daniel B]

Great function. Work well and is fast.

[Josiah Yoder]

Just what I was looking for - works great.

[sylvio berlusconi]

your are a genious

[Matteo Tajana]

thank you, I've been looking for such a function for ages! ;-)

[Alexander K.]

Very useful function

[Eric DeGiuli]

Great, does just what I wanted.

[Joseph Marks]

It "rocks"; it allows a "surf"-like plot without the hassles and inaccuracies of preppoing the dating over a regular grid!
First-rate work.

[Tim A]

Thanks a lot, very useful

[Esben Almkvist]

Nice!
I would add a:
if nargout>0
   g = gcf;
end
That way you get a cleaner function if you don't need the output.

[Mike Ross]

Exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

[Abel Brown]

Holy Jehosaphat!! worked outta the box! The funktion did exactly what i just spent the last hour trying to do! what a fantastic function for scientifik data! you're my hero!!!!

thanks x 10!

[Shazux The Great]

one that you should never miss!

[Jveer]

very nice indeed! any chance of further speed optimization?

[Adam Pilchak]

excellent file.
For those interested in additional functionality in terms of viewing contours and slices through 3d data, check out:
http://www.paraview.org

[aaaaa]

 

[Le]

very good job! thank you!

[Alvaro Canivell]

Very useful indeed !

Something I was missing in it:

- A label for the color bar, that could be passed in the 'strs' together with the title and the rest of the labels.

If somebody wants that, just tell me, I added that

Thanks again !

[Vishesh Vikas]

Very good - its way quicker than scatter3. Uses much less memory :)

[Peng Huang]

I would suggest to change "length(L)" to "size(L,1)" since when points are too less (i.e. less than 3), error will happen. Besides that, it is great! Thanks:)

[Nathan]

minor grid does not show up on Z-axis when Zscale is set to log
(i.e. set(gca,'zscale','log');

any idea why this is occuring?

[Nathan]

 

[Joseph Miller]

Simple, fast and clean. VERY good job! Thank you!

[daniel]

After trying and failing to plot my data (3e6 points) using scatter3, this little guy did it for my lickety-split. Is a 4D set, so plotting first 3 dimensions as spatial, and fourth as color. Just had to make sure my nargs matched up via cells, so did {data(:,1) data(:,2) data(:,3)} as first arg to plot3k, and data(:,4) as second for color.

A+ rating from this matlab user.

[Navneet Viswan]

Is it possible to use this code to scan images with laser stripe in it and plot out the 3D point cloud of the laser traced portion? with depth?

Kindly help me out

[James]

 

[Alexander]

Great code. One small improvement:
Change length(L) to size(L,1) on 96 and 141 lines. Otherwise, it's not working with one data point