Hi all,
I just started using Agisoft Photoscan Pro (0.9.0) for processing UAV data for creating digital surface models with a 6-core XEON processor and 32GB RAM. I am pretty impressed by Photoscan's ability on automating this workflow, but run into a few problems.
According to the documentation the algorithm "height field" is optimized for creating terrain geometry.
A typical UAV flight contains 1000 jpeg images of 16MP, the largest area consists of 4 sequential flights with app. 4000 images. The height field algorithm is indeed fast and low on memory. However, the result is not satisfying as it seems the point cloud is imported into a TIN and then simply converted to a digital surface model (distinct faces are present in the terrain model). The "arbitrary" method gives far better results (see figure), but 32GB of RAM is not enough to even process 800 images (photoscan is killed with 'out-of-memory', 400 images seem to work fine).
Is there a better way to process my 4000-images-project, other then using arbitrary mode and split my area into 10 subprojects? Or is the memory management of arbitrary mode better in v0.9.1? As all the images are in one folder (ordered in flight lines) it is quite some work to localize all images and create subfolders for creating chunks.

The figure shows a shaded reilief image of the digital surface model that represents a landslide on a hillslope.