drawing rectangle on surface plots

Hi,

I draw a rectangle on a surface plot with the rectangle command however only some part of the rectangle is displayed. What could be the problem with this?

subplot(1,2,2)
surface(c/20,b/20,dset2(120:180,1:s(1)), 'EdgeAlpha',0)
set(gca,'XTickLabel',[])
set(gca,'YTickLabel',[])
xlim([0 2.5]);
ylim([-1.5 1.5]);
hold on;
rectangle('Position',[0,-0.5,2,1],...
         'LineWidth',2,'LineStyle','-')
     daspect([1,1,1])
hold on;

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

rectangle() is a 2D object only, and is not certain to show up at all unless the viewpoint is from directly above or directly below.

There are other MATLAB handle-graphic objects that are 2D only as well, such as image objects; the same difficulty applies to them.

line and lineseries objects such as are produced by plot() can have this same difficulty if only X and Y was specified, but fortunately these line objects can be made 3D by set()'ing their ZData property to be non-empty.

If you need your shape to be visible at other angles, you need to draw it as a patch() or surface(). (For images, usually the easiest approach is to texture-map them on to a patch or surface object.)