Matlab: how to plot a text in 3D

Question

text(x,y,z,'text') works in 3D space however it is not 3D. Is there a way to plot a simple 3D text in matlab, something as simple as this:

I do not need shadowing or rendering, only to be able to add 3rd dimension to the text.

Answer 1

There is no way to do this using text. You would have to have an image of the text and texture map the 2-D image onto a 3-D surface. By default graphics are rendered in the axes using an orthographic projection, so to create perspective as you have in your image above you would have to either:

1. Artificially create it by shrinking the length of one side of the surface on which the image is texture-mapped.
2. Adjust the view projection of the axes.

Here is some sample code to illustrate the above. I'll start by creating a sample text image:

hFigure = figure('Color', 'w', ...        %# Create a figure window
                 'MenuBar', 'none', ...
                 'ToolBar', 'none');
hText = uicontrol('Parent', hFigure, ...  %# Create a text object
                  'Style', 'text', ...
                  'String', 'PHOTOSHOP', ...
                  'BackgroundColor', 'w', ...
                  'ForegroundColor', 'r', ...
                  'FontSize', 50, ...
                  'FontWeight', 'bold');
set([hText hFigure], 'Pos', get(hText, 'Extent'));  %# Adjust the sizes of the
                                                    %#   text and figure
imageData = getframe(hFigure);  %# Save the figure as an image frame
delete(hFigure);
textImage = imageData.cdata;  %# Get the RGB image of the text

Now that we have an image of the text we want, here is how you can texture map it on a 3-D surface and adjust the view projection:

surf([0 1; 0 1], [1 0; 1 0], [1 1; 0 0], ...
     'FaceColor', 'texturemap', 'CData', textImage);
set(gca, 'Projection', 'perspective', 'CameraViewAngle', 45, ...
    'CameraPosition', [0.5 -1 0.5], 'Visible', 'off');

And here's the resulting image: