This was originally a test to see if I could avoid merging the generated chunks by just taking photos of the base and flipping them in Lightroom, hoping to trick Metashape into just combining them and continuing. unfortunately, this did not work in this case, so had to merge the clouds traditionally in the end, though in other instances I have had success so more research into this workflow will be needed to see what is needed. at the moment it looks like a more bland background and closer to the scanning object seems to work best.