How do I vary color along a 2D line?

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Kathryn McCormick
Kathryn McCormick il 8 Apr 2011
Modificato: Adam Danz il 31 Gen 2023
I am plotting the x,y position of a point over time. I have the data in two vectors, xpos and ypos, and I plot the path of this point using plot(xpos,ypos).
I would like to have this line change color gradually, representing the time axis ( or the index of the x, y vectors).
Is there an easy way to do this?
  1 Commento
Rajiv
Rajiv il 10 Feb 2014
Can be show line plot with different color, if not to use the surface plot as Matt did.

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Risposta accettata

Matt Fig
Matt Fig il 8 Apr 2011
Modificato: Adam Danz il 31 Gen 2023
This is one of the classic 'tricks' of MATLAB graphics.
x = 0:.05:2*pi;
y = sin(x);
z = zeros(size(x));
col = x; % This is the color, vary with x in this case.
surface([x;x],[y;y],[z;z],[col;col],...
'facecol','no',...
'edgecol','interp',...
'linew',2);
EDIT
Changed edgecolor to interp and linewidth to 2. This looks less ragged on my machine.
  11 Commenti
Image Analyst
Image Analyst il 19 Gen 2021
Adding the plot so we can actually see what it looks like:
x = linspace(0, 2*pi, 1920); % HDTV resolution.
y = sin(x);
z = zeros(size(x));
lineColor = x; % This is the color, it varies with x in this case.
% Plot the line with width 8 so we can see the colors well.
surface([x;x], [y;y], [z;z], [lineColor;lineColor],...
'FaceColor', 'no',...
'EdgeColor', 'interp',...
'LineWidth', 8);
grid on;
Roy Goodman
Roy Goodman il 17 Mag 2021
Modificato: Roy Goodman il 17 Mag 2021
I tried this for something I'm working on, and am getting a weird artifact:
Each of the 6 edges of this tetrahedron are computed using the line
surface([x1 x1]',[x2 x2]',[x3 x3]',[y y]',...
'facecolor','none','edgecolor','interp','linewidth',6);
where the arrays x1, x2, x3 parameterize a straight line in 3D space, and y is constant on three of the edges and a monotonically varying sigmoidal function on the other three edges. As you can see from this image, the color index looks very non-monotonic and even noisy on the three edges where the solution varies.
The included graphic was created using the print command, but this is how it appears on the screen as well.
I've tried a few tricks to fix it, neither of which helped
  • reducing the number of colors in the colormap
  • changing the 'edgecolor' to 'flat'

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Più risposte (3)

KSSV
KSSV il 18 Feb 2022
x = 0:.05:2*pi;
y = sin(x);
z = y;
patch([x nan],[y nan],[z nan],[z nan], 'edgecolor', 'interp');
colorbar;colormap(jet);

Daniel Refy
Daniel Refy il 7 Mar 2015
N=1 numel(data(:,1)) for a=1:N:numel(data(:,1))-N plot(data(a:a+N,1),data(a:a+N,2),'.','Color',[(a/numel(data(:,1))),0,0] ) hold on end
this will change color of the line from black to red

Paulo Silva
Paulo Silva il 8 Apr 2011
Something similar to this:
plot(xpos(1:10),ypos(1:10)) %first points in blue
plot(xpos(11:20),ypos(11:20),'g') %green ones
plot(xpos(21:end),ypos(21:end),'r') %final points in red
another way, the hold all function makes the plots with different color (until the list of available colors ends and after it start from the first one again)
clf
hold all
plot(xpos(1:10),ypos(1:10))
plot(xpos(11:20),ypos(11:20))
plot(xpos(21:31),ypos(21:31))
... %more plots until the end of the indexes
You can insert the code inside a for loop
clf
hold all
N=7; %every N points change color
for a=1:N:numel(xpos)-N
plot(xpos(a:a+N),ypos(a:a+N))
end
  2 Commenti
Kathryn McCormick
Kathryn McCormick il 8 Apr 2011
Thanks for the reply. I want to vary the color continuously, not in chunks.
Paulo Silva
Paulo Silva il 8 Apr 2011
You can change the order of the colors and give the impression of it being continously.
axes
MyColorOrder=get(gca,'ColorOrder'); %RGB combinations per row
%make your own color order, you can even add more row (more possible colors)
set(gca,'ColorOrder',MyColorOrder); %RGB combinations per row
hold all
N=7; %every N points change color
for a=1:N:numel(xpos)-N
plot(xpos(a:a+N),ypos(a:a+N))
end

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