How to preserve the 3d plot box, when changing patch visibility.

I have a 3d plot with a collection of patches. If I set a subset of patches Visible attributes to 'off', the plot box is recomputed. How can I capture and preserve all aspects of the plot box so that the visible patches don't jump around as other patches become visible or invisible.

Answer 1

[Matt J]

Use axis(), xlim(), ylim(), zlim(), etc... both to capture the current limits and/or to set the box limits that you want explicitly.

Answer 2

[Voss]

You don't need to capture anything.

To preserve the axes limits as they are, set the axes XLimMode, YLimMode, and ZLimMode to 'manual'. Obviously you would do that at a point in the code where the axes limits are what you want them to be, e.g., after all patches are initialized.

Other axes properties besides the limits affect the plot box, so you may want to set some other properties' modes to 'manual' as well in order to disable all undesired automatic changes to the plot box, e.g., PlotBoxAspectRatioMode, CameraViewAngleMode, etc. Look through the axes properties to see what you have control over:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.graphics.axis.axes-properties.html

[John]

It seems I do need to capture previous values because setting the ?LimMode's causes the limits to change.

See below how the ZLim values change when the YLimMode is set.

>> [ax.XLim, ax.YLim, ax.ZLim]

ans =

-0.1561    6.1561    1.0000    5.0000    0.5000    5.5000
>> ax.XLimMode = 'manual';
>> ax.YLimMode = 'manual';
>> [ax.XLim, ax.YLim, ax.ZLim]

ans =

-0.1561    6.1561    1.0000    5.0000    1.0000    5.0000