Plot sphere with different resolution in long and lat direction

Hi everybody,

I would like to modify MATLAB's

sphere(n)

function such that I can plot a sphere with different resolution in longitudinal and latitudinal direction, i.e. something like

   sphere(10,100)

would plot a sphere (and return its [X,Y,Z] grid) with 10 segments in latitudinal direction (north to south) and 100 segments in longitudinal direction (west to east), evenly spaced. What's the quickest way to doing this?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

[David Goodmanson]

Hi Peter,

There is really not the kind of limitation on surf that you seem to imply. This example shows a sphere with different number of points for latitude and longitude.

m = 10;                         % latitude
n = 25;                         % longitude
theta = ((-m/2:m/2)/m)*180;     % degrees
phi =   ((0:n)/n)*360;          % degrees  

[theta1 phi1] = meshgrid(theta,phi);
x = cosd(theta1).*cosd(phi1);
y = cosd(theta1).*sind(phi1);
z = sind(theta1);

surf(x,y,z)