Question

I need to make a GUI in which you can rotate a surf plot. I currently have a surf plot in my GUI, but I can’t rotate it whatsoever. Clicking it doesn’t work, and it has no menu bar on top of it. Can someone help?

Answer 1

When you create a GUI with GUIDE, by default it will remove the toolbar and menubar from the GUI’s figure window, by setting the ‘Toolbar’ and ‘Menubar’ properties of the figure to ‘none’. That’s usually a good thing, as there’s a lot of functionality available in the figure toolbar and menubar that means it’s difficult for you, as the GUI designer, to keep control of the workflow users will experience.

If you just want to make the surf plot rotatable, quickly, you can set the ‘Toolbar’ property of the figure to ‘figure’ using set(f, 'Toolbar', 'figure') if you have the handle f of the figure, or set(gcf, 'Toolbar', 'figure') if not – gcf is the handle to the current figure.

A better way would be to leave the toolbar off, and to maybe add a togglebutton uicontrol labelled “Rotate on/off”. In the callback of this togglebutton, put some code that calls the command rotate3d on the axis of your surf plot to switch rotation on or off. Maybe do the same for panning, zooming as well. That way you can provide rotation while keeping control of the GUI workflow.