MATLAB: Can surf or plot3 be modified to vary in x or y but not z

non-uniform gridplot3surf

Hi all,
If I generate a grid, e.g.:
x = [1:11];
z = ones(length(x));
surf(z)
xlabel('X');set(get(gca,'xlabel'),'rotation',10); 
ylabel('Y');set(get(gca,'ylabel'),'rotation',-10);
zlabel('Z')
to give:
please, how can I vary in the x-direction? Instead of having 11 straight y-axis lines, I'd like each line to be irregular (haphazard profiles), showing variations in x.
I can vary in the z-direction by using, e.g.:
x = [-83,-19,38,61,53,23,-5,-25,-23,-13,-6];
for i = 1:length(x);
    z(i,:) = x.*rand(1,length(x));
end
surf(z)
xlabel('X');set(get(gca,'xlabel'),'rotation',10); 
ylabel('Y');set(get(gca,'ylabel'),'rotation',-10);
zlabel('Z')
to give:
but I'm having a hard time varying in x or y.
Thanks, Mike.

Best Answer

You can pass surf() a matrix of X and Y points. For example,
y = sort([-83,-19,38,61,53,23,-5,-25,-23,-13,-6]);
[X, Y] = ndgrid(1:11, y);
X = X + randn(size(X));
Y = Y + randn(size(Y));
Z = X.^2 + exp(sin(Y));
surf(X,Y,Z);
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