My deepest apologies - the problem was that in order for me to see the resulting icon correctly in the render view, I had set the camera background to white, which means the shadow rendered on a...

Sorry mate, you're misunderstanding me. It's not the "blurriness" of the shadows I'm interested in, they're blurry the way I like it. It's the fact that on the Use Background object, they're way too...

Lighting is from two point lights, with the upper one with raytracing shadows.

I use Maya to make icons, and I've been trying on and off for quite some time to make the "Use Background" shader work as I like.

The end result should be a icon which is a transparent PNG file...

Ok. So I have an object that's lying on a plane, casting a nice shadow - or creating a nice reflection. I want to use the finished image on the web.

But, we have a catch 22 here. In order for Maya...

Ok, sounds reasonable. Only, I never change any of that. And even so - why would that affect only some of the objects I'm importing?

No, it's the reverse. The objects move fine when I move them one-by one, but when I select the entire group (in the outliner) that's when some objects move differently, which is weird.

I wrote...

Uh, weird subject line, I admit, but here's my problem (which I am having with Maya 8.5 for Intel Mac):

When I am working on a scene and paste in, or import, objects from another scene sometimes...