Question

How can I define a 3D matrix in MATLAB?

For example a matrix of size (8 x 4 x 20) or add a 3rd dimension to an existing 2D matrix?

Answer 1

Create a 3D matrix

A = zeros(20, 10, 3);   %# Creates a 20x10x3 matrix

Add a 3rd dimension to a matrix

B = zeros(4,4);  
C = zeros(size(B,1), size(B,2), 4);  %# New matrix with B's size, and 3rd dimension of size 4
C(:,:,1) = B;                        %# Copy the content of B into C's first set of values

zeros is just one way of making a new matrix. Another could be A(1:20,1:10,1:3) = 0 for a 3D matrix. To confirm the size of your matrices you can run: size(A) which gives 20 10 3.

There is no explicit bound on the number of dimensions a matrix may have.