How can I place a quiver plot on top of a surface plot?

When I place a quiver plot on a 2-D surface plot (pcolor), resizing or printing the figure window causes the quiver plot to disappear. I would like to place a quiver plot on top of a surface plot.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

The quiver plot disappears because both the surface plot and quiver plot are located in the XY-plane (Z = 0) and the renderer is set to 'painters'. You can avoid this issue by changing the renderer as follows:

set(gcf, 'renderer', 'zbuffer')

If you would like to keep the renderer to 'painters', you can place the surface plot at a -Z offset. For example:

xord = -2:.2:2;

yord = -2:.2:2;

[x,y] = meshgrid(xord,yord);

z = x .* exp(-x.^2 - y.^2);

[px,py] = gradient(z,.2,.2);

quiver(x,y,px,py)

hold on

h = pcolor(x,y,z);

set(h,'ZData',-1+zeros(size(z)))  % Move the surface plot to Z = -1

colormap(gray)

shading interp