surface disappears when zdata is set to 0

for some reason i want to set the zdata of a surface plot object to zero, keeping its color, and setting view point to [0 0 1] (looking at it from the top).

code used:

surfobjhandle=surf(X,Y,Z);
colordata=get(surfobjhandle,'cdata');
view([0 0 1]);
set(surfobjhandle,'zdata',zeros(size(get(surfobjhandle,'zdata'))));
set(surfobjhandle,'cdata',colordata);

however, this way the surface is not visible anymore with the viewpoint set to [0 0 1]. it only appears setting a different viewpoint which is not what i want. why is this?

[Jan]

Please provide some values for X, Y and Z, which allows to reproduce the problem.

[Friedrich]

Most likely a rendering problem. Try running

opengl neverselect

before running your code. Or manually change the renderer to painters or zbuffer.

[Peter]

i'm puzzled: it's almost 3 weeks after i posted the question and i'm not able to reproduce the problem anymore... the code i posted works just fine now.

[Jan]

@Peter: If you had posted the test data I've asked for, the problem would have been solved faster, perhaps.

Answer 1

[Kevin Moerman]

This example is probably equivalent to what you want:

[X,Y,Z]=peaks(25); figure; surf(X,Y,zeros(size(Z)),Z) ; view(3); axis vis3d;

Perhaps you loose your plot because of axis tight? That sometimes crops too tightly. Also have a look at using the pcolor and imagesc commands instead.

Kevin