Matlab face/edge alpha and phong lighting
Alec Jacobson
February 29, 2012
Turns out matlab's figure renderers can't handle transparency and phong lighting simultaneously. I noticed this when trying to have transparent edges overlaid on a phong shaded surface.
Matlab documentation reads:
You do not specify Phong lighting (OpenGL does not support Phong lighting; if you specify Phong lighting, MATLAB uses the ZBuffer renderer).
Or
Figure objects use transparency (OpenGL is the only MATLAB renderer that supports transparency).
So that's that. Hopefully Matlab will fix this in the future. For now I will probably just composite figures in Photoshop if need be.