Ive created this scene and used a hair particle system for the clumps of grass. I rendered and notice my grass has no shadow! Ive hunted for an answer, but all grass tuts I find make entire fields, no shadows needed. How can I get my strands to cast a shadow? I keep getting upload of image error, so hopefully someone can help w/o the image. Using cycles 2.72.
With a little more research I see I need buffered shadows with a spotlight to get shadows on a strand render. I see no way to enable this tho when I place a spotlight in my scene. I can do it with BlenderInternal, but Im using cycles. Any help?
By default, Cycles automatically renders the shadows of hair particles…
If you show us your settings or provide a blender file with that issue, maybe we can find what must be changed.
About buffered shadows, that is something related to BI render. Cycles does not use this method!
OK, cool, im uploading .blend link now!
Having an error with jpeg, so file link is coming!
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/32730
LINK! Thankyou
Well… I see shadows on my render 
The thing is that all your lights are huge, and any point on the ground receives so much light from any other place, that the shadow of any light will become unnoticed.
I turned off the lights, as that are actually for the model, just focusing on the grass with environment light
without the lights, all the illumination comes from the world texture, which produces also very very very soft shadows. They are there, but there is lots of light flooding from all directions.
In order to have more defined shadows, your light source must be smaller… What kind of lighting conditions are you looking for? Clear sky? Rainny? Dawn? Perhaps using a Sun light would give you the results you’re expecting, but you still need to change your world material.
I’m looking a late evening, something matching the background. I’ll go mad professor some when I get home from work, thanks for the insight. I’ll cancel the environment lighting, and go with a sun lamp, low on the horizon to cast some longer more defined shadows. I just think it would add a lot to the scene. Thx again and I’ll post results this evening!
You can make your grass strand more ‘visible’ in the scene by increasing the Thickness Scaling (Cycles Hair Settings under the Particle Tab) up to 1.0. This will make the overall grass strands thicker and they will produce darker shadows because of this.
