Partial transparent surface plot

Hello together,

I'm trying to plot a surface where all points with a z value between -0.5 and 0.5 are 100% transperent. I've tried to make all these values to NaN (not a number). This works, so far, that the surface looks like expected, but i can not use the data cursor. When using the data cursor matlab crashes. Is there another way of makeing areas transparent or does anyone know, why matlab crashes?

Thank you for your help.

Rafael

Answer 1

[Massimo Zanetti]

Play with Chart Surface Options: https://it.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/chartsurface-properties.html

You can set AlphaData to 0 where you don't want to see any colour. Here is an example hiding values of a trigonometric function between 0 and 1:

[X,Y] = meshgrid(1:0.5:10,1:20);
Z = sin(X) + cos(Y);
s = surf(X,Y,Z);

s.AlphaData = (Z<=0) | (Z>=1);
s.FaceColor = 'texturemap';
s.FaceAlpha = 'texturemap';

[Rafael Kübler]

Thank you. This somehow worked. But i'm using z-buffer as renderer and with this, it doesn't seem to make any difference in transperency. When using painters the surface looks like expected but i also get some ugly numbers all over the figure. That was the reason to choose z-buffer in the first place.

[Massimo Zanetti]

Are you just visualizing the image or trying to print it using print? Please, post some of your code.

By the way, from the help page Figure Properties I see z-buffer is no longer supported:

Note: The 'zbuffer' option has been removed. Use 'opengl' or 'painters' instead.

What Matlab version are you using?