How to create a color gradient using a third variable in Matlab?

matlab matlab-figure
thephysicsguy picture thephysicsguy · Aug 7, 2017 · Viewed 7.7k times · Source

How do you create a color gradient in Matlab such that you plot a 2D line plot of y=y(x), and you color it using another variable that also depends on x such that z=z(x). A scatter or point plot is also fine by me.

I would also like to have a colormap legend kind of thing showing the color gradient and it's actual representation of z. This stuff is quite common in visualisation tools such as VisIt and ParaView but I could not yet FIGURE it out in Matlab.

Answer

EBH picture EBH · Aug 7, 2017

If a scatter plot is fine, you can use the 4th input to scatter:

x = -10:0.01:10;
y = sinc(x);
z = sin(x);
scatter(x,y,[],z,'fill')

where z is the color.

enter image description here

Related questions

Setting graph figure size

All I want to do is make the width greater and the height smaller. I'm just doing raster plots but this question applies to any MATLAB figure. I can manually resize it using the figure directly when it's created but …

Read More
Automatically plot different colored lines

I'm trying to plot several kernel density estimations on the same graph, and I want them to all be different colors. I have a kludged solution using a string 'rgbcmyk' and stepping through it for each separate plot, but I …

Read More
Changing Fonts Size in Matlab Plots

I want to change Font Size for xlabel, ylabel, axis size, legend font size a.k.a everything at once, is this possible? By default, font is Helvetica 10. Is there way to change this? I want to use 'FontSize',14, for …

Read More