Displaying the order of objects on an axis

I have a matrix that I am making a surface plot of and then trying to overlay a rectangle on top of it. I can not get the rectangle to be displayed on top of the surface.

figure(6)
h1= surface(M)
h2= rectangle(0,0,3,3,'Facecolor','r')
% I have tried to flip the children objects of the current axes but they did not work. I also tried uistack
% Is there something about a surface object that prevents anything from being rendered on top of it?
set(gca,'children',flipud(get(gca,'children')))

[Adam]

Are you sure the rectangle is present on the axes and within the axis limits that you set rather than somewhere off the axes?

Answer 1

[Chris McComb]

You're having this problem because the rectangle command draws the object in the xy plane, with z=0. Therefore, since I'm guessing your surface has z > 0, the rectangle necessarily falls underneath it.

What if you did something like this?

% Plot surface
h1 = surface(M);

% Max height in surface
max_surf = max(M(:));

% Make a patch instead of rectangle
h2 = patch([0 3 3 0], [0 0 3 3], max_surf*ones(1,4), 'r');

[Bob Friday]

Thanks, this makes sense and works great!