## Friday, July 25, 2008

### matlab .m 3D Plot on a Spherical Surface

SPHERE3D plots 3D data on a spherical surface. Useful particularly in metrology of spherical surfaces, spherical wavefronts and wavefields.

SPHERE3D(Zin,theta_min,theta_max,phi_min,phi_max,Rho,meshscale)plots the 3D profile Zin as a mesh plot on a spherical surface of radius Rho, between horizontal sweep angles theta_min and theta_max and vertical phi_min and phi_max, with mesh size determined by meshscale.

SPHERE3D(Zin,...,meshscale,plotspec)plots the 3D profile Zin with a plot type specification. If plotspec = 'surf' a standard surface is plotted, whereas 'mesh', or 'meshc'will plot mesh,or mesh with contour, respectively. A special contour is plotted when plotspec = 'contour'. The default is mesh if not specified.

SPHERE3D(Zin,...,meshscale,interpspec)plots the 3D profile Zin with the interpolation specification, interpspec, which can be one of 'spline', 'linear', 'nearest' or 'cubic'. The default interpolation is linear if not specified.

SPHERE3D(Zin,...,meshscale,Zscale)plots the 3D profile Zin with the data scaling factor, Zscale. This allows you to scale the peaks and troughs of the data on the surface if the radius is relatively large. Zscale larger than 1 magnifies the data range. Zscale defaults to 1 if not specified.

[Xout,Yout,Zout,Cmap] = SPHERE3D(Zin,...) returns output values corresponding to the Cartesian positions (Xout,Yout,Zout) with colour map, Cmap.