MATLAB: 3D plor plot

3d plotspolar plot

Is there a way to plot data in a cylindrical scatter plot? I have a (70000×3) matrix of angles, radius and a third variable that I would like to plot in the same graph.
Much like the polar plot plus an additional z-direction. I have seen "3D Polar Plot" etc, but they only provide mesh or contour plots and I would like to plot the individual points. Basically a scatter3 but in cylinder coordinates.

Best Answer

The pol2cart function will convert this to 3D Cartesian, so it's easy to get the scatter plot:
npts = 70000;
th = 2*pi*rand(npts,1);
r = 5+rand(npts,1)/3;
v = randn(npts,1);
[x,y,z] = pol2cart(th,r,v);
c = v;
scatter3(x,y,z,8,c,'.')
axis equal
view(-65,42)
You don't get a polar grid with this approach though. If you need that, I think that there are some options on the File Exchange .
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