XSORT MATLAB PATCH

When it finds coplanar objects, it tries to draw them in child order, but it has a number of limitations. What's going on here is that the technique that the graphics system uses to sort the objects struggles when it encounters coplanar objects. ax.SortMethod = 'depth' īut that still doesn't explain this picture, does it? figure(1) This means that it ensures that the objects which are closer to the viewer cover the objects which are farther from the viewer. What's happening is that when we use 'depth' for the SortMethod, the graphics system sorts all of the objects in 'depth' order. Wow, it turned inside out! Now permuting the children does change the picture. So lets try setting it to childorder for this scene. But the property allows us to override the choice that axes makes. In most cases the axes will choose the correct value and we won't have to worry about our SortMethod. The axes has noticed that we have a 3D scene and it has chosen depth instead of childorder. That's because the SortMethod property has changed. Same with the blue and green patches.īut if we permute the children in this case, the picture doesn't change.

XSORT MATLAB PATCH

The cyan patch is first, and it covers the red one. Patch(, 'c', 'DisplayName', 'cyan')Īt first it looks like the same rules apply here. Instead of being coplanar, these patches are arranged around the outside of a cube. In this case the Z coordinates are not the same. Next we'll create a simple 3D scene out of patches. We'll create a new figure so we can come back to that example later. So what happens if we set SortMethod to the other option? ax.SortMethod = 'depth' Įww! That's a mess, isn't it? Why would we ever want that? To answer that question, we'll have to take a trip to 'the third dimension' (I don't know the markup for adding scifi echo sound effects to that last phrase). An object which is near the beginning of the Children list always covers an object which is later in the Children list. The rule with childorder is pretty simple. Now the green patch is first, so it covers both the red one and the blue one.

I can change the order of the children by setting the Children property to a permutation of it's current value. That's because the SortMethod property of the axes is set to 'childorder'. The blue patch covers the green one, and the green patch covers the red one.

The last patch added is also the one we see in the areas where they overlap. Patch(, 'b', 'DisplayName', 'blue')Īs we can see here, the last patch we created is the first one in the Children list of the Axes. In other words, they all have the same Z coordinates. I've set they're DisplayName properties so that we'll recognize them when we see them at the command line.Īlso note that they are coplanar. We renamed it because it's a very important property and we want to make sure that everyone understands what it is for.įirst we'll create a very simple scene. It's actually been around for a long time, but it wasn't supported by all renderers, and it had the confusing name 'DrawMode'. Today we're going to talk about the SortMethod property which was added to the Axes object in R2014b.

Xsort matlab