I ended up writing the playback controls myself which was surprisingly quick and easy to do using 'pushbuttons', 'sliders' and 'listboxes' http://goo.gl/QohdbR
The animation was written in conjuction with V-Realm Builder (negating the need to write code to describe 3d objects) which is not very good software but by far the best thing that I have come accross for animating in Matlab. The viewing options I used were the built in controls of V-Realm Builder.