Specify color from scatter3()
You can specify the color of each point when you call scatter3(X,Y,Z,S,C) or by using the property-value, scatter3(X,Y,Z,. . .,'MarkerFaceColor',C) where C is an n-by-3 matrix of RGB value, one row for each point.
Specify color using the scatter object handle
Alternatively, you can specify the color after plotting by setting the CData property as an n-by-3 matrix of RGB values.
h = scatter3(. . ., 'filled');
h.CData = C;
Creating the RGB matrix
One simple way to create the RGB color matrix is to use one of Matlab's colormaps and specify the number of points. This example uses jet and inputs the number of values in the first input to scatter3, X. See this list for other built-in colormaps.
C = jet(numel(X));
To add a colobar,
set(gca, 'colormap', C)
colorbar()
Full Demo
figure
[X,Y,Z] = sphere(16);
x = [0.5*X(:); 0.75*X(:); X(:)];
y = [0.5*Y(:); 0.75*Y(:); Y(:)];
z = [0.5*Z(:); 0.75*Z(:); Z(:)];
h = scatter3(x,y,z,'filled','MarkerEdgeColor','k');
axis equal
box on
C = jet(numel(x));
h.CData = C
set(gca, 'colormap', C)
colorbar()
