Lewis -- I'll have to look at XNormal more closely...interesting. Although their website is a train wreck. PP -- It looks like LightUp will do what I want...I've been in touch with Adam...it needs to calculate the lighting first, but it's real-time after that. But my question was about doing it with SketchUp's own shadows, to speed up animations. The pre-calculation should be faster. It seems like such an obvious feature. However, if LightUp can deliver the goods with animation...

I have often wondered why a shadow couldn't be expressed as a material. I think you're on to something here, Tim. I'm sure the SU gurus have pondered this, yes?

@wo3dan said: Tim, I don’t get it. You mean that when you have selected something it is not possible to click next to the group- or component- names in the outliner to deselect, i.e. in white space. That would be an immense MacDrawBack. In Windows we can. And what would be the purpose of an empty group…… I still don’t get it. Clicking on a special empty group in the outliner to unselect is like asking for that white space. A group of any size that has nothing visible (and I don’t mean by hiding entities) is easy but you would still select it by clicking on it, whether in the model or in the outliner. Dylan’s suggestion for another mouse sounds like a good idea. Wo3Dan Wo3Dan -- I can see you've never used the Mac outliner! OK, we can stretch it vertically, but often, my list of groups fills the entire window. No white space. Clicking in the white space to the side of a group selects that group. If we could simply click on the top-level model name to deselect everything (like you can in Windows)...I think it was CraigD who agreed this should be implemented, but that was over a year ago... There are a LOT of problems with the Mac Outliner...but that's for another place... Oh, and thanks for the tip, Johnny!