contour lines obscured on a surface.

I'm plotting a surface - this seems to work fine. I get the colours I expect and the shading looks ok.

I've added contours to show isolines. Except as you can see in the image some of the text is obscured by the shading seemingly. It makes the contour lines hard to read and overall makes the plot look a bit rubbish!

Code below, variable names changed to obscure IP:

levels = [0:1:15]
figure(1);
colormap(jet)
str=sprintf('My title');
title(str);
hold on;
grid on;
surf(X,Y,Z)
shading interp
[C,h] = contour3(X,Y,Z,'k','LineWidth',1);
clabel(C,h,'color','k','labelspacing',60);
colorbar

Answer 1

[Voss]

If you only need to see the plot from above (2d, xy view), then you can set Z to zero in the surf call but still use your Z for the surface colors. This makes the contour show up above the surface in the z-direction. (If your contour has negative values, use a number smaller (i.e., more negative) than anything in the contour for the surface Z instead of zero.)

X = 1:10;
Y = 1:10;
Z = 10*rand(10);

figure('Position',[1 1 700 1000])

subplot(2,1,1)
colormap(jet)
title('Original');
hold on;
grid on;
surf(X,Y,Z)
shading interp
[C,h] = contour3(X,Y,Z,'k','LineWidth',1);
clabel(C,h,'color','k','labelspacing',60);
colorbar

subplot(2,1,2)
levels = [0:1:15];
figure(1);
colormap(jet)
title('with surface Z = 0');
hold on;
grid on;
surf(X,Y,zeros(size(Z)),Z)
shading interp
[C,h] = contour3(X,Y,Z,'k','LineWidth',1);
clabel(C,h,'color','k','labelspacing',60);
colorbar

[Richard Nash]

Nailed it! Thank you.

[Voss]

You're welcome!