Hanspan - it just looks like your scene occupies too small a portion of the shadow map (generated from the light's shadow cam) and what few pixels there are, are blown away by anti-aliasing when the maps are mixed for the render. Or, to say it another way, your shadows are there, but they are just too low res and antialiased so much that they are getting completely blurred out. Ya needs mo pixels! At the risk of becoming tedious, take a look at your scene in reply #8 and view it from the Shadow Cam of the overhead light. If your scene appears very small in the center of the frame from this camera view, just zoom in the Shadow Cam until your scene starts to fill the frame. Using this greater larger portion of the frame gets you more pixels of the shadow map actually allocated to the cast shadow areas. This will make the shadows more pronounced with sharper edges when you return to your regular camera view and render. And Spike, its really neither hard nor time consuming, I'm just not explaining well. As you can see in the three images above, its actually quite predictable and controlable.