[Tutorial] Ingame Mapping 101 - Newbie Friendly

In order to have a more direct way of reaching your game folder, install it where you could reach with one click. Somewhere like in C:\Warband, you'll thank me later in this tutorial. Plus, I always found to avoid crashes by not using Program Files as an installation directory for no game whatsoever. Lets get now to (example): C:\Warband\Modules and copy our Native folder, renaming it to a name of our liking.
Now lets light up the game (not literally - just launch it).

° In the Launcher, go in Configure then towards the 'Advanced' section and check the box indicating 'Edit Mode'. Edit mode won't slow down your framerate nor slow your game in general, unless you use it. In order to see the edit window, you need to run the game in windowed mode (don't worry, if you want to take a fullscreen snap, press rgt. Alt + Enter).

° In the game, if you press CTRL+E in a scene, it'll open an edit window. If you press CTRL+E on the campaign map (only in SP) it'll give your the coordinates for your party's current position on the map. If you again press CTRL+E in the character creation window, it'll give you a facecode, necessary for when you'll be creating troops or fixing the face of some ugly lady.

In order for these controls to work, you need to hold them down. As in the use of SHIFT when you need a capital letter, key that then needs to be released.
B: Change the dimension of the object you've selected.
R: By pressing R, you will reset the object to its original form and position.
T: Moves the mesh on a vertical axis, up or down. When you keep the T button pressed, you cannot move the mesh other than vertically.
G: Lets say that one of your placed objects is stuck in a wall, while it is selected (the orange color indicates that it is selected), press G and drag it around with your mouse, occasionally lowering or raising it with the T key. The G key doesn't works when you still need to place an object, it works only for placed objects.
Z: Rotates the mesh on the Z axis.  / Depending on the X-axis, you can rotate it clockwise or anti-clockwise. Similar to what you could do with the U key.
X: Rotates the mesh on the X axis. / When you move an object on this axis, deselect it and reselect it, alining it to flat ground as eye referrence.
Y: Rotates the mesh on the Y axis. / By playing with these space modifiers, you can dynamically move your object in whatever position you desire.
CTRL+RMB: Allows you to select more than one mesh (useful only for mass delete or mass dragging something out from the way).
CTRL+F11: /!\ This is very important for when you will be creating a navigation path (AI Mesh) for NPCs to use. If you don't pause the game, thus stopping all the animations, your game will CTD (crash to desktop) when you'll attempt to modify the AI Mesh.
Double-pressing your direction keys (W. A. S. D) you will move the camera faster. Useful for when you need to get that little detail in place, fast.
DELETE: Your best friend when you screw up (by placing stuff)

What does not work?
° You cannot import height maps. (no .bmp in 24bits for you!)
° You cannot copy & paste objects. (no CTRL+C/V neither!)
° There's no autosave. Keep in mind to save. If a blackout suddenly happens in your zone, and you've been working for the last 3 hours, that's lost work. To save, just press again CTRL+E and allow the changes  to be saved. (Backups will be found in Native, in Sceneobj - if you've followed my advice and screwed up with something) ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR WORK

Keep in mind, that when you affect the terrain itself, like making a river or a lake (in order to even make a river, you need to lower the terrain under 0) you will need to exit your current scene and re-enter it, in order to allow the game to render it. The scene_prop water_river is not to be used to create water on a map. If your river or lake looks jagged, use the smooth tool, and gently smooth (with a hardness of 0.50/0.70 - to still give a certain feel to it when adding more detail later) it around its borders, then reload the scene.

Want to add pebbles to it? No problemo.
Go into the texture section, and put both sliders to 0.50, and grab 'Turf' texture first. Turf is the only texture that allows other textures such as 'Brown Stone' or 'Grey Stone' to have their borders properly softened out, put a nice layer of turf around the edges of your river (depending on its size, you can increase or decrease its brush size) and then use the Pebbles texture, by being careful to fill the center of the river too. If you get alpha-error (texture holes) move your cursor on one of the edges and click over it with your selected texture, and you'll fix it. There is no undo. Keep in mind to save from time to time, unless you want to redo everything, since there's no undo. Playing with the sliders is useful for creating paths or paved roads.

You'll notice that the other textures do not have grass, why so? By using your middle mouse button (which for convenience we'll call MMB from now on) you can cover your terrain with a default texture with rendered grass (thus not requiring you to replace it manually). The developers of M&B, from time to time have used color as well when creating their scenes, if you happen to find red, green or blue spots somewhere, go into color editing and press MMB to delete the stains from the ground. You could even create a vulcano with this tiny little function.

Work in progress.

Work in progress. Need screenshots.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

Work in progress.

In order to share your work with us, go into Modules\Native\Scene_obj and bring up the contextual menu by pressing your right mouse button, then set the files to be displayed by the last modification made. You'll understand which is which this way. Copy the file that you've edited, and place it somewhere in the meanwhile. Now go back in Native, open scenes and navigate to the name of the file of the scene file you've retrieved. You'll find something like this

scn_castle_moray 256 none none 0.000000 0.000000 100.000000 100.000000 -100.000000 0x000000015303d7f46781253f02033e4c02101466784e212
  0
  0
outer_terrain_town_tihr

This is the terrain code. You can change them with those available in your outer_terrain and outer_terrain_b resources
This is the 'bordering' terrain you see. A sort of distant land to break the horizon. When creating small heighted islands, add a 0 instead.
Your scene, keep an eye for extra additional scenes linking to it. A town could have a store scene, a tavern scene, an arena scene, a prison scene and a castle scene for example.

° Placing plants in interior scenes. You'll CTD while editing or the next time you try to enter that interior (requiring you to fix the scene by overwriting it with a backup).
° Increasing or decreasing the scale too much (collision mesh will make it crash actually)
° Adding too much objects
° Too much shadows for the game to handle properly