I had a strange outcome with PS 1.0 build 1789 when trying a new model-building strategy (build model from whole flight instead of chunks, with no interpolation). The project is 809 cameras (777 aligned) in 4 overlapping flight lines along a 30 km river corridor.
Normally I would align all images and add GCPs, then optimize alignment before splitting into chunks and building dense cloud and surface model with ~50 000 000 faces, with interpolation enabled. This time I decided to build a single surface with no interpolation (Was hoping to avoid hole-filling in wetted channel). I ended up with a very broken-up model with poor detail resolution.
First I aligned all images and added GCPs, then optimized alignment. Then I built dense cloud and mesh in batch process. My dense cloud is 622 613 930 points, but the model only has 12 096 826 faces. There is virtually no detail in the areas where normally I can see quite a lot (terraces, logs, etc). I attached an image showing the sparse point cloud with the model generated from the dense cloud in the same area (sparse cloud is only 832 012 points, but still better resolution than the model.
Dense point cloud reconstruction was 3 hours 33 minutes, and model generation was only 34 minutes 43 seconds. What I don't understand is that there were clearly a lot of points in valley bottom areas (even in sparse cloud generation), but these points look like they were "skipped" for surface reconstruction. I don't know if that's because of the "aggressive" setting or the "no interpolation" setting but it seems weird. There are holes in the surface model where the river is, like I expected, but in the valley bottom, where the detail should be good, it is very poor - only a few polygons instead of thousands.
It would be nice if instead of interpolation/extrapolation/disabled, I could specify maximum area (or distance) to interpolate, and some way to exclude the small islands outside of the main model area.
Settings were:
Build Dense Cloud
Quality: Ultra-high
Depth Filtering: Aggressive (read in a post that is preferred "default" setting now?)
Reuse depth maps: No
Build Mesh
Surface Type: Height field
Source data: Dense cloud
Interpolation: disabled
Face Count: Custom
Custom Face Count: 50000000