User defined surface grid

Hallo.

I am currently having troubles with defining a grid on the surface of my 3D plot (created by using mesh-function to plot with).

Would like to have something in between what's seen on the pictures below.

Wish to create following grid:

• Horizontal lines (parallel with x-axis) for z = (0:1:10)
• Vertical lines (parallel with z-axis) for x = (-10:2:10).

My code:

[X,Y] = meshgrid(-8:.1:8); 
R = sqrt(X.^2 + Y.^2) + eps;
Z = sin(R)./R;
surf(X,Z,Y,Z)
set(gca,'YDir','Reverse','ZDir','Reverse')
colorbar; ylabel('y'); xlabel('x'); zlabel('z') ;
shading interp % To create right picture

What is the Matlab command for creating a surface grid as i wish?

Answer 1

[Jeremy Wurbs]

Ahh, I see. That is trickier. I get slightly better results by changing

mesh(XX,ZZ,YY,ZZ);

to

surf(XX,ZZ,YY,ZZ,'FaceAlpha',0)

although some of the edges are hidden still. If you're willing to cheat a little you can stick the edges out a tad bit:

surf(XX,ZZ+0.03,YY,ZZ,'FaceAlpha',0)

which seems to produce decent results.

[Lars]

Thank you so much for your help.

Answer 2

[Jeremy Wurbs]

Great question. If I'm understanding correctly, you don't like the lines connecting your points to be so prevalent. You can fix this in your surf line:

surf(X,Z,Y,Z, 'EdgeAlpha', alpha)

Where alpha is some value between 0 and 1 (0.2 is probably good).

Hope that helps and is what you were looking for. Cheers.

Answer 3

[Lars]

Thanks a lot for the answer so far. It improved a lot on the figure.

However it was not entirely what i was looking for. In the picture below i want a combination where i have the smoothness of the surface from the left picture but the gridlines from the right picture.

I tried with following code, where i create 3D plots in same figure, but can't get the "mesh" to be transparent.

[X,Y] = meshgrid(-8:0.1:8) ; 
[XX,YY] = meshgrid(-8:1:8) ;

R = sqrt(X.^2 + Y.^2) + eps ;
Z = sin(R)./R ;
ZZ = (Z((1:10:size(Z)),(1:10:size(Z)))) ;
surf(X,Z,Y,Z,'EdgeAlpha', 0) ; hold on
mesh(XX,ZZ,YY,ZZ); 
set(gca,'YDir','Reverse','ZDir','Reverse')
colorbar; ylabel('y'); xlabel('x'); zlabel('z') ;

The result is as following, which i don't like either:

[Hannes Eschmann]

an excessive way of archiving a smooth coarse grid, would be to just create it yourself, e.g., via

smoothMesh(X,Y,Z,10,'k',1,1)

where

function smoothMesh(X,Y,Z,delta,color,alp,w)
hold on
for i = 1:delta:size(X,1)
   p = plot3(X(i,:),Y(i,:),Z(i,:),color,'LineWidth',w);
   p.Color(4) = alp;
end
p = plot3(X(end,:),Y(end,:),Z(end,:),color,'LineWidth',w);
p.Color(4) = alp;

for i = 1:delta:size(X,2)
   p = plot3(X(:,i),Y(:,i),Z(:,i),color,'LineWidth',w);
   p.Color(4) = alp;
end
p = plot3(X(:,end),Y(:,end),Z(:,end),color,'LineWidth',w);
p.Color(4) = alp;