I've got a scene where I'm drawing(to scale) the earth, moon, and some spacecraft. When the moon is occluded by the earth, instead of disappearing, it is still visible (through the earth).
From my research I found that part of the problem is that the near settings for my camera were much too small, as detailed in the article linked, small values of near cause rounding in z-sorting to get fuddled for very distant objects.
The complexity here is that I need to have fine grain z-indexes for when the camera is zoomed in, to look at a spacecraft (an object with a radius of 61 meters at most, in comparison to the earth, weighing in at r =~ 6.5e+06 meters). In order to make objects on the scale of the moon and earth to render in the correct order, the near has to be at least 100,000 m at which point I cannot look at close objects.
One solution would be to reduce the scale to use kilometers, but I cannot afford to lose that precision, and prefer to use meters.
Any ideas as to how to make very large, distant objects render at the correct z Indices, while retaining scale and ability to zoom into small objects?
My Ideas (which I don't know how to implement):
As per @WestLangley 's answer, the solution is simply to add the optionlogarithmicDepthBuffer: true to the renderer:
this.renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer({antialias: true, logarithmicDepthBuffer: true});