nance, Here's a pic to show what I've found with switching 'casr shadows' on/off. As you can see, the floor for the room I built gives a much better shadow when 'cast shadows' is switched on for that body part. With the ground, it doesn't seem to make a huge difference, although I haven't really tested this, since I never use the ground plane. You say that changing this setting resets the shadow cams. I can't get this to happen at all. Weird.... Moral of the story seems to be that 'cast shadows' should be left ON for non-ground plane objects. Hope this helps someone. mac