Issue with low values for surf and colorbar

I was getting issues with colorbar in some of my work, so I went in to dig in the issue, and found out that surf and colorbar have weird behaviors for low values. I am using the student version 7.14.0.739 (R2012a). When I type :

 surf(peaks(30))

It's all good and I get the expected plot :

But when I use a (much) smaller peaks, like in

 surf(1e-7 * peaks(30))

I get no surface displayed, as below :

While pcolor still works fine, colorbar however cannot keep up, and only half of it appears in the wrong position, as in

 pcolor(1e-7 * peaks(30))
 colorbar

gives the following :

I am unsure but do not think the issue happens on non-student versions. Anyway, a little info on how to deal with it (apart from playing around with bigger values and renaming colorbar ticks) would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

[Kelly Kearney]

Looks like an OpenGL issue. Try

set(gcf, 'renderer', 'zbuffer');

You can read up more on this, and possibly find some workarounds, here: http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/figure_props.html#Renderer

[Benoit]

Your solution works like a charm! I had seen it before but did not think about trying it...

Thank you very much for your quick and very efficient answer!

[Chad Greene]

This helped me too--thanks Kelly!