How to render a 3d object in MATLAB

I am trying to make a model of 3d medical data very similar to the example given for the function isocaps. However, there are problems:

1. The isocaps result is unacceptably slow even on powerful machines, for example when constructing it or rotating it.

2. I am not interested in the red colored patch-side edge thing. I just want the grayscale 3d (4d counting the color) data.

3. I would like to be able to view different slices in the x-y-z directions without having to re-compute the entire isocaps nonsense.

4. Is there a way to do this with scatter3?

[Walter Roberson]

scatter3 creates a patch for every point, and thus is usually quite slow for rotating 3D images.