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I'd like this question to serve as a hub for all things realtime shadow related.

What setups and techniques are you guys using to achieve reliable and good looking realtime shadows in your Unity Pro based games? How are you avoiding such pitfalls as giant pixels, shimmering, and overall ugliness? The docs are good, but what isn't mentioned that is must know?

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To avoid the pitfalls I always try to avoid using realtime shadows, especially hard shadows.
What I do:

Indoor scenes:
- lightmaps (take a look at the Sewer Control Room)
- no lights
- only geometry with self-illumination (with or without halos)
- no realtime shadows

Outdoor scenes:
- one overall lightmap (painted by hand)
- one directional light as the sun with low intensity
- projectors for blob shadows (advanced: aligned with the direction of the sun light)
- realtime soft shadows with low intensity
- soft shadows only enabled for 'farer away' 3rd person cameras
- projectors for extra spot lights
- no self-shadowing

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Thanks, this answer is really what this thread is for. Ashkan is right, the documentation is pretty comprehensive, but documentation and experience are different things, and the docs cannot cover every nuance of the system. Examples like "in my game XYZ that is outdoors with changing day/night cycles, we did blah". – Ben Throop Feb 9 at 15:37
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Give it a try to lightmaps with the external lightmapping tool http://masteranza.wordpress.com/unity/lightmapping/

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Many game reviewers are looking for realistic lighting effects (even in fast paced racing games). So we could provide two 'light mode'-versions of our games.
One 'offline' version for nice looking snapshots and game play movies. And one for the player where shadow and light usage or intensities are reduced to a minimum (depending on camera distances/angles, speed, ...).

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the documentation is complete. if you need to know more take a look at this link in wikipedia.

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1 
 Ben's question would seem to be oriented towards not liking the default look, and wondering how it can be improved/tweaked. – Ricardo Feb 8 at 23:30
the link that i provided here has many technical details about how one implement shadow maps and it can help to understand the technique better and change the settings better and with more knowledge and improve the quality. – Ashkan Feb 9 at 3:32

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