Is it possible to link the axes of two surface plots for 3d-rotation?

Question

Say I have two 2-dimensional matrices of equal size and create a surface plot for each of them.
Is there a way to link the axes of both plots, so that one can 3D-rotate both of them simultaneously in the same direction?

Prioress

surf(A); hold on; surf(B);? This will add both plots to the same coordinate frame though. You want to have 2 frames? – Masha

Yes, two frames would be better.. – Prioress

There is a one-liner that simplifies @Masha 's callback solution. – Prittleprattle

Answer 1

Playing with ActionPostCallback and ActionPreCallback is certainly a solution, but probably not the most efficient one. One may use linkprop function to synchronize the camera position property.

linkprop([h(1) h(2)], 'CameraPosition'); %h is the axes handle

linkprop can synchronize any of graphical properties of two or more axes (2D or 3D). It can be seen as an extension of the linkaxes function that works for 2D plots and synchronizes the axes limits only. Here, we can use linkprop to synchronize the camera position property, CameraPosition, the one that is modify when one rotate an axes.

Here is some code

% DATA
[X,Y] = meshgrid(-8:.5:8);
R = sqrt(X.^2 + Y.^2) + eps;
Z1 = sin(R)./R;
Z2 = sin(R);

% FIGURE
figure;
hax(1) = subplot(1,2,1);    %give the first axes a handle
surf(Z1);
hax(2) = subplot(1,2,2);    %give the second axes a handle
surf(Z2)


% synchronize the camera position
linkprop(hax, 'CameraPosition');

You can have a list of the graphical properties with

graph_props = fieldnames(get(gca));

Prittleprattle

Oh linkprop() is nice indeed. This solution also gives continous updates while my answer only synchronizes once the user lifts the mouse button. – Masha

This worked! but I find that linkprop([h(1) h(2)], 'View'); works even better than 'CameraPosition'. – Salvadorsalvadore

@ESala, thanks for the tip; however, how is View better than CameraPosition? Is CameraPosition not as robust? – Brewer

I found that View feels more consistent. With CameraPosition there is some kind of snapping going on when you're at a small angle to one of the coordinate axes. – Heer

Answer 2

One way is to register a callback on rotation events and synchronize the new state across both axes.

function syncPlots(A, B)
% A and B are two matrices that will be passed to surf()

s1 = subplot(1, 2, 1);
surf(A); 
r1 = rotate3d;

s2 = subplot(1, 2, 2); 
surf(B);
r2 = rotate3d;

function sync_callback(~, evd)
    % Get view property of the plot that changed
    newView = get(evd.Axes,'View'); 

    % Synchronize View property of both plots    
    set(s1, 'View', newView);
    set(s2, 'View', newView);
end

% Register Callbacks
set(r1,'ActionPostCallback',@sync_callback);
set(r1,'ActionPreCallback',@sync_callback);
set(r2,'ActionPostCallback',@sync_callback);
set(r2,'ActionPreCallback',@sync_callback);

end

Masha