Hiya,
Right i have found that the falloff was not the cause (as a matter of fact i couldn’t see this having any effect on my model when i played with it), I fiddled some more and found that my bpr shadow angle was the problem, i think zbrush defaults on 0.5 mine was set on 30!! I somehow have saved my current project with strange bpr settings. Think it may have come from the start of the project, i used the default project light grey Dynawax128 sphere, which could contain the strange angle settings??? who knows, all sorted now
thanks again and cheers for pointing me to the digital tutors vid on bpr shadows very useful, there is a few newer features not covered but its still very useful.
James