Orbit3d

3d orbiting camera control for Matlab uiaxes

Orbit3d for Matlab

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.

Features

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 h	Show help

Example code

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

Installation

addpath('src')

or, if you use ToolboxToolbox

tbUse('Orbit3d')

Keywords

Matlab, interactive, orbit, orbit3d, 3d, quaternion, geometry, rotation, axes, uiaxes, figure, plot, visualization, patch, mesh, graphics

Author

Copyright 2022-2023, Markus Leuthold, [e-mail]

License

BSD-3-Clause (https://opensource.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause)