MATLAB: How to plot the contour of a surface at a specific height

Question

I have a surface that has been defined using surf(S) where S is simply a 25×25 matrix, i.e. the height of the surface at a particular point is represented by the elements in S.

Now, what I want to have is the curve on the x-y plane representing the points of S that are at height 3514. So I saw how I could add a plane at height 3514 and find the intersection of the plane and interpolate, but this seemed quite involved and I figured maybe there's an easier way? For example, surfc plots contours on the x-y plane of the 3D plot for you. Would there perhaps be a way to specifically determine at what height you wanted the contour and then extract the vector representing that curve and plot it separately on a 2D plot?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not sure I follow, do you just mean something like this?

z=peaks;
surf(peaks)
hold on
contour3(z,'LevelList',2,'Color','red')