How do I set a surf to one color (no gradient) in my matlab-plot?

Answer 1

The easiest way to create a surface that has just 1 color and a given transparency value is to set the 'FaceColor' and 'FaceAlpha' properties of the surface object:

hSurface = surf(...your arguments to create the surface object...);
set(hSurface,'FaceColor',[1 0 0],'FaceAlpha',0.5);

This example sets the surface color to be red and the transparency to 0.5. You can also set the edge properties too (with 'EdgeColor' and 'EdgeAlpha').

Answer 2

It is not clear to me what you want to do. When you say one color for the surf, do you mean exactly one color, or do you mean you want shades of gray?

Here is some code that will do a variety of things, you can choose which lines to use:

x = rand(1,20);
y = rand(1,20);
z = rand(1,20);

[X,Y] = meshgrid(linspace(0,1,10),linspace(0,1,10));
Z = rand(10)*0.1;

clf
plot3(x,y,z,'.');
hold on
h = surf(X,Y,Z)
hold off

%% This will change the color
colormap(copper)
%% This will remove colordata
set(h, 'cdata',zeros(10))
%% This will make transparent
alpha(0.5)

Answer 3

@matlabDoug has what you need, I think. The property cdata holds color data that gets a color map applied to it. Setting it to an array the same size as your surface data, with each element in that array having the same value, will make your surface one color. With the default color map, setting everything in cdata to zero will make your surface blue, and setting everything to 1 will make the surface red. Then you can play with the alpha to make it transparent.