I hear what you guys are saying, but what I'm asking is why does realism demand that a fire throws different colors of light in different directions. Does it?

And as for true realism, what's really missing from these types of lighting situations, however you do them, is inverse square falloff. Search for that and you'll see a post here where I showed how to make lights in Poser do that. If you don't implement that, you will never get realism when you're talking about lights that are only a few feet away from people around a camp fire. The figures that are closer should be more brightly lit. You can do that with Poser's linear distance falloff, but that is not physically accurate. That will make the light go to 0 at some distance. Light doesn't do that.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)