Texture mapping in MATLAB

Note that the function trisurf that you were originally trying to use returns a handle to a patch object. If you look at the 'FaceColor' property for patch objects, you can see that there is no 'texturemap' option. That option is only valid for the 'FaceColor' property of surface objects. You will therefore have to find a way to plot your triangular surface as a surface object instead of a patch object. Here are two ways to approach this:

If your data is in a uniform grid...

If the coordinates of your surface data represent a uniform grid such that z is a rectangular set of points that span from xmin to xmax in the x-axis and ymin to ymax in the y-axis, you can plot it using surf instead of trisurf:

Z = ...  % N-by-M matrix of data
x = linspace(xmin, xmax, size(Z, 2));  % x-coordinates for columns of Z
y = linspace(ymin, ymax, size(Z, 1));  % y-coordinates for rows of Z
[X, Y] = meshgrid(x, y);               % Create meshes for x and y
C = imread('image1.jpg');              % Load RGB image
h = surf(X, Y, Z, flipdim(C, 1), ...   % Plot surface (flips rows of C, if needed)
         'FaceColor', 'texturemap', ...
         'EdgeColor', 'none');
axis equal

In order to illustrate the results of the above code, I