Beyond the Basics - Basics of MATLAB and Beyond - page 166

MarkerEdgeColor The colour of the marker, or the edge colour for filled
markers.

MarkerFaceColor The fill colour for markers that are closed shapes.

The key to patch colouring is to define a colour matrix of the right size
for the type of colouring you want to apply. The following tables illus-
trate the kinds of patch colouring possible with the FaceVertexCDdata
property of patches. The matrices are shown assuming that the patch
has N f faces and N v vertices.

Indexed Colours:

One colour One colour

Single colour per face per vertex

C 1
C 2
. . .
C N f

C 1
C 2
. . .
C N v

C

In the table above, the numbers C are indices into the current colour
map and in the following table R , G , and B represent red, green, and
blue intensity values between 0 and 1:

True (RGB) Colours:

One colour One colour

Single colour per face per vertex

R 1 G 1 B 1 R 1 G 1 B 1

R 2 G 2 B 2 R 2 G 2 B 2

RGB

. . .
R N f G N f B N f

. . .
R N v G N v B N v

We now give some examples of colouring effects (for a detailed descrip-
tion of the patch colouring properties see the Using MATLAB Graphics
manual).

Example: Stressed Cable Supposethatyouareanengineerworking
on a problem involving a cable under stress. You want to display the
shape of the cable and colour the cable according to the stress at each
point along it. We implement the display using a patch . First we
generate some x , y , and z data to define the shape of the cable. For
illustrative purposes let us assume the cable shape is a one-turn helix: