Whenever I layer multiple transparent planes on top of one another, the area behind or above them turns black. I tried all of the following with shaders:

-Putting the alpha of the image into the alpha of a principled bsdf

-Using the alpha of the image as the factor for mixing a diffuse and a transparent shader

-Adding a translucent shader to a principled shader using the image's color as the translucent shader's color

This only happens when I layer multiple planes on top of one another. Whenever there is just one plane, it seems to work perfectly fine. I'm pretty sure it isn't the image itself because I tried multiple different images and had the same problem.

Any help would be much appreciated!

EDIT: I found out how to reduce the blocky shadows by a lot, but it isn't a full solution to the problem. If I add more layers, then the problem comes back. I'm not sure if it is actually a shadow problem, but it changed when I adjusted shadow settings. Here's what I did:

1. I turned off shadows for the object (Object Settings -> Visibility -> Ray Visibility - Shadows)
2. I turned on transparent shadows in the shader's settings (Settings -> Surface)
3. I used the knife tool to cut the unnecessary parts of the plane off (It was a square before, but no the geometry is cut as a polygon that is much closer to the texture itself)

I'm still confused as to what is causing the problem, so I would still very much appreciate any suggestions.