Creating rainbow coloured plots in 3d

I have values of z varying with respect to x, for various values of y. I've plotted them in 3d using plot3 command. I want to colour them in terms of their z values, as in like highest with the red, lowest with blue, similar to the image attached. Please help!

[Star Strider]

The turbo colormap most closely matches the visible spectrum.

Answer 1

[Karim]

This can be done with the patch command, see below for a demonstration

numPoints = 100;

% create a random line
Grid = zeros(numPoints,3);
Grid(:,1) = 10 * cos( 1:numPoints);
Grid(:,2) = 10 * sin( 1:numPoints);
Grid(:,3) = 1:numPoints;

% define some metric to determine the color
MyColor = sqrt( sum(Grid.^2 ,2) );

% create a connectivity matrix
Faces = [1:(numPoints-1); 2:numPoints]';

% create the figure
figure
patch('Faces', Faces ,'Vertices', Grid ,'FaceColor', 'none', 'FaceVertexCData', MyColor ,'EdgeColor','interp' ,'LineWidth',5);
colormap jet
caxis([min(MyColor) max(MyColor)])
c = colorbar;
c.Label.String = 'Some Metric [-]';
view(3)
axis equal

Answer 2

[DGM]

One common way to do this is by using a scatter plot. Unlike plot() or plot3(), scatter() and scatter3() can have their markers colormapped.

x = linspace(1,10,500);
y = 10*sin(0.5*x);
z = 0.1*x.^2;

scatter3(x,y,z,10,z,'filled');
axis equal
grid on
colormap(jet)

... but since there are no lines drawn between markers, you need enough point density that it appears as a solid line. If your data is not dense enough for satisfactory appearance, you may have to create an interpolated copy for the purpose of creating the plot.

% only 50 points
x = linspace(1,10,50);
y = 10*sin(0.5*x);
z = 0.1*x.^2;

% create interpolated copies
np = linspace(1,numel(x),numel(x)*10); % 500 points
xp = interp1(x,np);
yp = interp1(y,np);
zp = interp1(z,np);

scatter3(xp,yp,zp,10,zp,'filled');
axis equal
grid on

In 2D, you can also use surf() to create variable-colored lines.

Using patch() may also be an option, depending on the needs.