In the finite element analysis, you have the coordinates of nodes and elements for node order. Also, to each node, the attached field variables such as displacement, temperature, velocity, moisture, electric intensity and so forth are the 4th dimension to be expressed by colors. It is convenient to use patch for depicting field variables.
For example,
gm = multicuboid(2,1,1);
model = createpde;
model.Geometry = gm;
msh = generateMesh(model,'GeometricOrder','quadratic','hmax',0.2);
element = msh.Elements';
element = element(:,[1,5,2,9,4,8, 2,6,3,10,4,9, 1,7,3,6,2,5, 1,8,4,10,3,7])';
element = reshape(element, 6, numel(element)/6)';
node = msh.Nodes';
patch('vertices', node, 'faces', element, 'facevertexcdata', ...
node(:,3), 'facecolor', 'interp','facealpha',1); % node(:,3) as color map data
colormap(hsv)
colorbar
axis equal
axis off
view(45,67)
If you are interested in postprocessing, you can see some of my exchange file:
femPatch or solidPath are for postprocessing
