MATLAB display certain vertex indices

Alec Jacobson

July 09, 2010

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When I'm prototyping with meshes in MATLAB it is often useful to plot the meshes in 3D. Then I might want to examine individual vertices. So say I have defined vertices V and faces F: 
[x,y]=meshgrid(1:10,1:10);
z = peaks(size(x,1));
V = [x(:),y(:),z(:)];
F = delaunay(x,y);
I can plot these normally with: 
trisurf(F, V(:,1),V(:,2),V(:,3))
matlab plot 3d mesh without vertex labels I can create an array to hold the vertex indices, then plot the labels at corresponding points in 3d: 
indices = 1:size(V,1);
text(V(:,1),V(:,2),V(:,3),num2str(indices'))
matlab plot 3d mesh with vertex labels And sometimes it helps to plot the labels in bold: 
text(V(:,1),V(:,2),V(:,3),num2str(indices'),'FontWeight','Bold')
matlab plot 3d mesh with vertex labels in bold Other times it is nice to push the labels off the vertex positions. Here I move them to the right a little: 
text(V(:,1),V(:,2),V(:,3),[repmat(' ',size(indices',1),1) num2str(indices')],'FontWeight','Bold')
matlab plot 3d mesh with vertex labels in bold and indented