I've come across this handy tutorial for using masks/tie points to align images:
http://www.agisoft.com/index.php?id=49this is supposedly allowing me to rotate the object, rather than having to orbit the camera around it, which would save me hours and hours AND HOURS of time - but unfortunately i can't get it to work.
i have background shots without the object that are completely masked, i created masks for the object shots, and all images align, but the result is complete mess of a point cloud that has nothing to do with my object, with all my cameras being either aligned to one single location, or a semi circle like this:
Has anybody figured this out yet? Would really love to get this to work...
UPDATE: a clean re-install fixed this issue, now alignment works impressively well. I'm planning to make this my new default workflow, really happy right now.