Nodes set up and height map import basics - help?

[Nordous]

So here's a list of questions I still have on setting up a new terrain that I haven't found answered after checking in all of the proper sections and watching the dev Q&A:

1) How does the single node dimension correlate with the node size? What measure is the node size? How do I calculate the ultimate scene size? How do I choose a prpoper node dimension, what are different values best for?
2) How do I calculate a scene/node size to fit in the height map TIFF/PNG or vice versa? How do I correlate everything with a real world scale (so I know that my imported height map is fit for human perspective rather than a compacted aerial view miniature)?
3) How do I properly use scale and offset functions?

Thanks in advance, please let me know if you can guide me through this or if there's any info on this that I have missed.

 

[NPC99]

As advised over Discord:

I've only been working on worldmaps, so I haven't looked to closely at the outermesh borders for mission scenes. If I remember correctly, the Native ones are square, which suggests the scene should also be square. For mission scenes, I don't think they use much bigger than 6x6 or 8x8 nodes. If any scene has terrain, you can use that to check. Just go into helicopter mode above the scene use Ctrl A to select all nodes (needs to be in properties tab of elevation mode) then count the number of white node boxes down each side of the screen. After specifying nodes you need to set length. This is a value in game equivalent metres. It is the length of each side of each square node. If you wanted a scene 300 metres x 300 metres you could use 6 x 6 nodes of 50 metres length for example. After that you need to specify the resolution in terms of vertices available in each node to create the terrain mesh. Too few and the terrain is awkward to sculpt without blocky/triangular artefacts. Too many and you increase the scene's processor load. I'm not sure what they use on mission scenes, but as they're smaller I'm sure you could use at least 512 x 512 without problems.
For heightmaps you want to use one with at least the same resolution in pixel terms as you have vertices in the scene overall. For example Calradia's main_map is 16x16 nodes using 256x256 vertices per node, so that gives 4,096 vertices per side of the scene (16x256). So, you'd need to use a 4K texture (4096 x4096). For some reason if you export the world's heightmap it gives you a 4097x4097 texture. I'm not sure what the extra pixel per side is for, but I'd stick with power of 2 resolutions for import.
Imported heightmaps are greyscale and can be either pgn or raw formats, 16 bit recommended as 8 bit ones are degraded. Raw format heightmaps are supposed to be better, but I've only used pgn and the scene editor only exports pgn format textures.