Trouble with aligning photos of a simple grey bowl with some pasta.

[farza]

Hey all! So I'm trying to get a 3D model of this bowl with some pasta inside (some sample images can be found https://imgur.com/a/k9nkM here. I drew random symbols on it in hopes that it would help Photoscan find more points of interest. Or else, the bowl would just be purely grey and there wouldn't be many points to find.

I took around 150 images of this bowl from a bunch of different angles with a lot of overlap, but, after running "Allign Photos"  (default settings) it seems that only the photos taken from near the top were being used. I don't have an image for this, but basically the blue squares that usually indicate where Photoscan thinks a photo was taken are concentrated near the top of the model.  There are no blue squares around the sides of the bowl.

So despite taking pictures from many angles, Photoscan seems to be incorrectly aligning and only showing those I took from the top. After creating the mesh, Photoscan does a very good job at recreating the top of the bowl and the pasta, but not the rest.

Is there something I'm doing wrong here? I've managed to model many different objects using my photography setup, but this bowl is giving some trouble. Thanks all.

[farza]

Small update. I took some new images of the bowl, but this time with newspaper placed on the the bottom and newspaper in the background. I placed the bowl on a turntable and used my tripod to take images from different heights. I took 100 photos.

The align photos step seems to have worked correctly, but now the mesh seems to have come out extremely broken (image attached).

This is medium quality after calculating a dense cloud.

Any tips would be fantastic!

[chrisd]

What is the ISO rating? It looks like you could use more light to get a faster (lower) ISO. This will reduce noise for a less "broken" result.

If you can't increase the light, try forcing a longer shutter speed by setting the ISO to 200, or even 100.

Mask the images in Photoscan.

Use RAW format if available. If you have a Canon point and shoot, CHDK will allow you to get the RAW images from the camera.