Here are a couple of useful things that MATLAB can do with 2D plots:

• filled polygons with text

  Source Code	Source Code

• pie chart

  
  

  
  % pie chart code
  a= [5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40];
  pullout = [0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 ];
  pie(a,pullout); % pull out one of the slices
  title('Sohie''s Sample Pie Chart');
  
  

• error bars

  
  

  
  x = linspace(0,2,21);
  % erf is a built-in special MATLAB function:
  %  erf(x) = 2/sqrt(pi) * integral from 0 to x of exp(-t^2) dt.
   
  y = erf(x);
  e = rand(size(x))/10;
  
  errorbar(x,y,e)
  title ('Sample Error Bar plot');
  

• Other specialized 2D graphs (check out via MATLAB's help)

  area - Filled area plot

  bar - Bar graph

  barh - Horizontal bar graph

  bar3 - 3D bar graph

  comet - Comet-like trajectory

  ezplot - Easy to use function plotter

  feather - Feather plot

  fplot - Plot functions

  hist - Histograms

  pie3 - 3D pie chart

  plotmatrix - Scatter plot matrix

  ribbon - Draw 2D lines as ribbons in 3D

  stem - Discrete sequence or "stem" plot

  stairs - Stairstep plot

Here are some fun 3D plots:

Source Code

Here is code for other fun 3D plots:

• torus
• snowcone

• Other specialized 3D graphs (check out via MATLAB's help)

  comet3 - 3D comet-like trajectories

  meshc - Combination mesh/contour plot

  meshz - 3D mesh with curtain

  stem3 - 3D stem plot

  quiver3 - 3D quiver plot

  slice - Volumetric slice plot

  surfc - Combination surf/contour plot

  trisurf - Triangular surface plot

  trimesh - Triangular mesh plot

  waterfall - Waterfall plot