User-friendly, feature rich replacement of Matlab's cameratoolbar
Matlab lacks a powerful and user friendly interactive tool to handle 3d objects in a plot. Matlab's own cameratoolbar doesn't allow to zoom in/out with the scroll wheel, does not set the light properly and has a quite esoteric orbit function. Furthermore, as of Matlab 2022a, cameratoolbar does not support the new web-based uiaxes
This toolbox implements a quaternion based 3d orbit. Multiple axes are supported, thanks to a newly implemented per-axes (rather than Matlab's own per-figure) event handler. Both the old java based and the new web based figures/axes are supported.
It provides an object browser which replaces the discontinued plotbrowser
| Event | Action |
|---|---|
| Left-click & move | Rotate objects |
| Double-click | Set rotation center |
| Right-click | User defined callback |
| Scroll wheel | Zoom towards to/away from mouse pointer |
| Key r | Reset view |
| Key t | Toggle transparency of selected obj |
| Key w | Toggle wireframe of selected patch |
| Key c | Toggle color of selected obj |
| Key b | Object browser |
| Key h | Show help |
hFigure = uifigure("Name", "Orbit3d (Press h for help)");
hAxes = uiaxes(hFigure);
% enable 3d orbit on the axis
gfx.orbit3d(hAxes);
% load & plot sample mesh
mesh = load('trimesh3d');
hPatch = patch("parent", hAxes, ...
"Vertices", [mesh.x mesh.y mesh.z], ...
"Faces", mesh.tri, ...
"FaceColor", "y");
Please find more examples in the folder examples about the following topics
- Simple 3d orbit
- Multiple uiaxes
- Per-figure and per-axes callbacks
- gca/gcf/clf/cla replacements for uiaxes/uifigure containing a 3d orbit
- Replacement for plotbrowser
addpath('src')
or, if you use ToolboxToolbox
tbUse('Orbit3d')
Matlab, interactive, orbit, orbit3d, 3d, quaternion, geometry, rotation, axes, uiaxes, figure, plot, visualization, patch, mesh, graphics, plotbrowser, browser
Copyright 2022-2025, Markus Leuthold, [email protected]
BSD-3-Clause (https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause)
