Attenuated shadows with software render?
 

Is there a way to get nice attenuated shadows using only the maya software render (rather than mental ray)?

attenuated? yes,

in the light, go down to the shadow>raytracing tab and there should be one of 2 options. light radius or light angle. just set those as high as you want :beer:

What I meant to say was without using Ray tracing (Maya software render only)
I've heard that you can hook up a dmap shadow and then tint the shadow by distance, but I'm not sure how to do that (sounds like something that would require a decent knowledge of mel scripting- which I don't have unfortunatly)

hmm, thats the filter size setting i think.....

anyway, why use Dmap shadows and not raytracing?

Just thought it would render faster. The scene has a lot of lights and geometry in it, and I'm already breaking it into several passes.