It is not possible to lock specific axis for rotate3D. However there is a workaround using the rotate function, using which you can fix the axis. Refer to the code snippet below as an example.
Rotate is not interactive, however by using the for loop as seen below, you can visualize rotation around any axis
% Sample plot
s = surf(peaks(20));
xlabel('x-axis')
ylabel('y-axis')
zlabel('z-axis')
% along z axis
direction = [0 0 1];
%rotate by 25 degrees
for i = 1:0.1:25
pause(0.2)
rotate(s,direction,i)
end
Documentation:
