To make shadows hard with a mesh light: use a very small mesh and make it brighter (increase the ambient value) To make shadows more soft with a mesh light: use a larger mesh and make it less bright (decrease the ambient value) A mesh light can be anything: Vicky can be a mesh light so long as you make her ambient value more than zero and use IDL in your render settings. It's always wise to have some sort of container, like a room or an environment sphere so the light can bounce off of something. as for your comparison image there, I suspect there are more lights out of view of the camera. The two that are visible look fairly bright. Laurie