Merge 2D plot with polar plot

Hello, I would like to merge two different plots in a single one like a 2D plot with a polar plot like it is shown in the image below. I would apreciate the help.

Thank you for your help.

[Mathieu NOE]

hello

it is certainly doable , so what's your issue ?

do you have some data ? code ?

[Jorge Luis]

Hi, sure. Here I attached the example of the two plots provided in the image. The file plot1.txt is the blue line with x and y coordinates as presented in the two columns respectively. Then, the second plot which is a polar plot should be placed on top of plot 1 whose data is in plot2.txt. Herein, the first column contains the angles and the second column contains the data with same units as plot 1. Thank you.

Answer 1

[Jaime Abad Arredondo]

As Mathieu said in the comment, what you want to do is definetly doable. As an example:

theta=linspace(0,2*pi,200);
r=3.*cos(2.*theta).^2; %Random made up function.

figure(1)
clf 
hold all
p=plot(r.*cos(theta),r.*sin(theta),'r');
%polar(theta,r,'b') %You can generate the polar plots as you wish.

N=50;
x_aux=linspace(-3,3,N);
Z=peaks(N); %Use built-in peaks function as example
surf(x_aux,x_aux,peaks(N))
shading interp

As you can see, the only caveat when mixing 2d and 3d elements in matlab is that the 2d elements are usually drawn at z==0, and therefore the surface plot is overlaid on top of the polar plots. In order to fix this, you have to modify the z-data of the polar plot:

figure(2)
clf 
hold all
p=plot(r.*cos(theta),r.*sin(theta),'r');
%polar(theta,r,'b') %You can generate the poar plots as you wish.

N=50;
x_aux=linspace(-3,3,N);
Z=peaks(N);
surf(x_aux,x_aux,peaks(N))
shading interp
%Setting the z-component of the polar plot to be the 
% maximum value of the surface plot, so that it appears on top
p.ZData=ones(size(p.XData)).*max(Z(:)); 

Answer 2

[Jorge Luis]

Hi, thank for your answer and help. Here I provide more details of what I need based on the plot provided in my first question. Here I attached the example of the two plots provided in the image. The file plot1.txt is the blue line with x and y coordinates as presented in the two columns respectively. Then, the second plot which is a polar plot should be placed on top of plot 1 whose data is in plot2.txt. Herein, the first column contains the angles and the second column contains the data with same units as plot 1. Thank you.

[Jaime Abad Arredondo]

Then it is just a matter of using a hold command to have the two plots together. Importing the data, going from polar to cartesian coordinates and plotting everything together you should get the desired plot...

data_cart=readmatrix('plot1.txt');
data_pol=readmatrix('plot2.txt');

plot(data_cart(:,1),data_cart(:,2),'b')
hold all
plot(data_pol(:,2).*cosd(data_pol(:,1)),data_pol(:,2).*sind(data_pol(:,1)),'r')

[Jorge Luis]

I used that alternative. I was looking for another option when combining the cartesian plot with the polar plot command in the same graph. Thank you for your response.