How to hide the axes in front of 3D plots

Hello,

I am doing a 3D plot and always have this annoying axes in front of my data (see image). How can I hide the front part of the axes? Just couldn't find it... Also I would be interested to change the spacing between the single graphs in the waterfall plot. Any idea?

Thank you!

[Christine]

Thanks for the great answers! Each of them was really helpful. I would have liked to accept all of them :)

Answer 1

[Orion]

Hi,

So to remove the annoying box :

box off

and for the spacing, it depends of the definition of your Z data. the more Z is meshed, the more waterfall will plot lines.

with the matlab example : f

igure
[X,Y,Z] = peaks(30);
waterfall(X,Y,Z)

figure
[X,Y,Z] = peaks(90);
waterfall(X,Y,Z)

[Christine]

Thanks! The 'box off' command takes off the whole box, so in order to still have a kind of box in the background, one has to set the axis limits to a grid line (-1 < radius < 1 and 0 < density < 2.5e19 in my example).

I see that a higher number of plotted profiles will cause the profiles to be closer to each other, as matlab keeps the z-axis (in my example) the same length. But how can I get the plots closer without increasing their number or changing the viewing angle? Is there a possibility to tell matlab to change the aspect ratio of the axes?

Answer 2

[Orion]

Did you use the waterfall function or plot3 (you mentionned single graph)

in all cases, if you want to play with the spacing you need to modify your yaxis data.

ex1 : plot3

clear
figure;
subplot(121);
x=(0:0.01:10)';
for i = 1:10
    y(:,i) = i*ones(size(x));
    z(:,i) = i*abs(sin(x));
end
grid;
plot3(x,y,z);
% 2nd figure : spacing .5 along y
subplot(122);
y(:,1:5) = .5*y(:,1:5); % divide y by 2
y(:,6:10) = 2*y(:,6:10); % divide y by 2
plot3(x,y,z);

ex2 : waterfall

figure
subplot(121);
[X,Y,Z] = peaks(20);
waterfall(X,Y,Z);

subplot(122);
Y(1:10,:) = .2 * Y(1:10,:);
Y(11:20,:) = 3 * Y(11:20,:);
waterfall(X,Y,Z);

[Christine]

I used the waterfall variant. Your suggestion is nice, but not exactly what I am looking for. Here, you still need the larger spaced graphs to fill the whole axis range in order to get the denser graphs in the front. Also the labels for the graphs are not right anymore. Another variant would be to keep the yaxis data unchanged but set the yaxis limits much larger than the actual data.

 figure
 subplot(121);
 [X,Y,Z] = peaks(20);
 waterfall(X,Y,Z);

 subplot(122);
 waterfall(X,Y,Z);
 ylim([-10,10])

In this case, however, one gets a lot of free space in the cube. What I want is a cuboid with different edge lengths as bounding box, rather than a cube.

[Orion]

ok, so you want to use the dataAspectRatio

[X,Y,Z] = peaks(20);
 figure
 subplot(121);
 waterfall(X,Y,Z);
 set(gca,'DataAspectRatio',[1 1 2])

   subplot(122);
   waterfall(X,Y,Z);
   set(gca,'DataAspectRatio',[.5 1 2]);

[Christine]

Great! This is exactly what I was searching for!

Answer 3

[Mike Garrity]

FYI, R2014b added a new BoxStyle property to the axes which controls whether you see those front edges. The default value is 'back', which does exactly what you want here.

To get the old behavior in R2014b, you would do this:

set(gca,'BoxStyle','full')

Regardless of your BoxStyle, the box command will toggle the visibility of the box.

[Christine]

Thanks, it looks as if it is time for an update :)