Hello,
I've been obsessing over a full-sized bronze copy of Michelangelo's David that stands here in my hometown. I've had mixed results at best but recently tried again.
I took over 500+ photos with a simple point & shoot Canon, imported the photos into Lightroom and set to work correcting the images for exposure, etc. I know that goes against the advice given in the manual, but with the subject being a dark, shiny bronze nude male, I thought it couldn't hurt to try a different approach.
I opened the folder containing all the photos in Photoscan and put it to work using the "Low" setting for each step.
You can imagine my surprise and joy when I came back hours later to discover that Photoscan not only used every photo but created a very good model. I only had to adjust the box around the statue, remove the fringes of overcast sky that had been piled like Marie Antionette's hair atop the statue's head and set Photoscan to work creating a dense cloud and finally a mesh.
I used the final, low-quality setting mesh model to create masks so I could turn around and start over with "High" settings and speed the process along.
It worked, but now I end up with some really wacky results that I can't figure out as shown by the screenshots below. What happened? It seems almost like using masks and focusing Photoscan on the statue made things worse.
I'm using a 2009 Mac Pro, 2.66GHz quad-core Intel Xeon with 32GB of RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 with 4GB of onboard RAM.