MATLAB: Displaying the order of objects on an axis

figure objects uistack

I have a matrix that I am making a surface plot of and then trying to overlay a rectangle on top of it. I can not get the rectangle to be displayed on top of the surface.
figure(6)
h1= surface(M)
h2= rectangle(0,0,3,3,'Facecolor','r')
% I have tried to flip the children objects of the current axes but they did not work. I also tried uistack
% Is there something about a surface object that prevents anything from being rendered on top of it?
set(gca,'children',flipud(get(gca,'children')))

Best Answer

You're having this problem because the rectangle command draws the object in the xy plane, with z=0. Therefore, since I'm guessing your surface has z > 0, the rectangle necessarily falls underneath it.
What if you did something like this?
% Plot surface
h1 = surface(M);
% Max height in surface
max_surf = max(M(:));
% Make a patch instead of rectangle
h2 = patch([0 3 3 0], [0 0 3 3], max_surf*ones(1,4), 'r');
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