Hi Jennifer,
my reply got apparently lost in the ether somewhere…
Short version:
- light and texture should be fine, light might only affect the texture-result, but in my cases (similar) it’s usually ok
- as you (and wishgranter said) the bases of the images in relation to the surface are way too small, some even almost on the same spot - deactivating them until only one in each spot is left was the first I did
- in the future, the images should be taken rather from the opposite face - as perpendicular to the target surface as possible
- the water and the reflecting metal grid won’t do the alignment much good either, you could try and mask those (plain colour is sufficient)
I tried around a bit, althought the results did not improve by much:
- deactivate the douplicate images
- put all the images in the same calibration- and lens group (0,1 or two etc. doesn’t matter which, only -1 means each image is being distorted individually)
- use K + brown 4 with tangential 2 (works best for me with smallest errors)
- repeat alignment a few times without changing anything
- when the errors go down significantly, start lowering the max repro error in 0.5 increments until reaching 0.5 or the component breaks up
- I got 0.6/0.23/0.25 max/median mean errors by doing that
However, the noise is similar, only there are fewer gaps in the surface…