Create a surface from several 1D plots

I have fitted several groups of scattered points (x,z) into 1D plots which vary on a third variable y. I now want to connect these discrete points in a 3D plot with the third axis being y. How would I go about doing this? I tried using the surf function but I need my y variable to be a matrix so I'm confused because for each entry in y (vector) a fitted (x,z) plot is created, so how could y be a matrix?

Apologies if I posed the question poorly and thank you.

Answer 1

[DGM]

Something like this:

% so you have a vector for x
x = linspace(0,1,10);
% and a bunch of vectors for z
z1 = x.^1;
z2 = x.^2;
z3 = x.^3;
z4 = x.^4;
z5 = x.^5;

% concatenate them into a matrix
z = [z1; z2; z3; z4; z5];
% define an appropriately-sized vector representing y
y = linspace(0,1,5);
% plot things
surf(x,y,z)

If you want more points along y than you have z-vectors, you'll need to interpolate

EDIT:

If there are different x-vectors, I don't really see why this won't work:

% so you have a bunch of vectors for x
nx = 10;
v = 0.05;
x0 = linspace(0,1,nx);
x1 = x0 + v*rand(1,nx);
x2 = x0 + v*rand(1,nx);
x3 = x0 + v*rand(1,nx);
x4 = x0 + v*rand(1,nx);
x5 = x0 + v*rand(1,nx);
% and a bunch of vectors for z
z1 = x1.^1;
z2 = x2.^2;
z3 = x3.^3;
z4 = x4.^4;
z5 = x5.^5;

% concatenate them into a matrix
x = [x1; x2; x3; x4; x5];
z = [z1; z2; z3; z4; z5];
% define an appropriately-sized matrix representing y
y = repmat(linspace(0,1,5).',[1 nx]);
% plot things
surf(x,y,z)

Answer 2

[KSSV]

1. See to it that all the curves have same dimensions. If not use interp1 and get them into same size.
2. Initliaze matrices X, Y, Z with rows as number of curves and columns as number of points in each curve.
3. Use surf on X, Y, Z.