View Overview

Viewing 3-D Graphs and Scenes

The view is the particular orientation you select to display your graph or graphical scene. The term viewing refers to the process of displaying a graphical scene from various directions, zooming in or out, changing the perspective and aspect ratio, flying by, and so on.

This section describes how to define the various viewing parameters to obtain the view you want. Generally, viewing is applied to 3-D graphs or models, although you might want to adjust the aspect ratio of 2-D views to achieve specific proportions or make a graph fit in a particular shape.

MATLAB® viewing is composed of two basic areas:

  • Positioning the viewpoint to orient the scene

  • Setting the aspect ratio and relative axis scaling to control the shape of the objects being displayed

Positioning the Viewpoint

Setting the Aspect Ratio

Default Views

MATLAB automatically sets the view when you create a graph. The actual view that MATLAB selects depends on whether you are creating a 2- or 3-D graph. See Default Viewpoint Selection and Default Aspect Ratio Selection for a description of how MATLAB defines the standard view.