Don't know much about nodes. I can confirm that colorshift doesn't actually work most of the time for ms3d exported models with default settings. I've never been able to get colorshift to work
Nodes are simply each 'thing' that is exported in a DTS file. So, each individual object and armature/joint/bone is a node. If you have no nodes, you have no object.
Ahh, I see. I'll try adding joints to my objects.