Does opengl have a limit to the number of transparent layers?

I've been working with patches with many transparent faces, and I have found that opengl seems to limit the number of transparent layers than can be seen behind each other.

Here is an example in which I plot a patch with 10 faces but only 5 can be seen (you can rotate the plot to see the hidden faces):

fig = figure;

n = 10;

x = linspace(0,1,n+1);

% vertex naming:
% 4 -- 3
% |    |
% 1 -- 2
x1 = x(1:n);
x2 = 1+0*x1;
x3 = x2;
x4 = x1;
y1 = 0*x1;
y2 = y1;
y3 = y1+1;
y4 = y3;
z = x;

verts = zeros(4*n,3);
faces = zeros(n,4);
for i = 1:n
    verts(4*(i-1)+(1:4),1:3) = [
        x1(i),y1(i),z(i)
        x2(i),y2(i),z(i)
        x3(i),y3(i),z(i)
        x4(i),y4(i),z(i)];
    faces(i,1:4) = 4*(i-1)+(1:4);
end
h = patch('Faces',faces,'Vertices',verts);
h.FaceAlpha = 0.1;
h.EdgeColor = 'none';

% fig.Renderer = 'painters';
fig.Renderer = 'opengl';

Painters does not exhibit this problem, but it is much slower (I'm using patches with ~100,000 triangles). My goal is to export to high resolution png's. I'm using MATLAB R2016a. Any suggestions?

Thanks, David

Answer 1

[David Pate]

I was able to fix the problem by switching to the Windows software opengl renderer:

>> opengl software

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/opengl.html