Did you ever start using gamma-corrected materials? If not, you're just spinning your wheels. As we said on page 1, this sort of subtle lighting is impossible to get right without gamma correction. Bantha posted a python script that will assist with converting each material to a gamma-corrected material.

Without gamma correction, you are choosing to increase the light intensity in order to compensate for how dark other things are appearing at a distance. This forces the local luminance inside the lamp to very high levels. As a consequence, the lamp is becoming over lit. Once your materials in general are responding to lighting correctly, then you will be able to light the room quite easily with a much lower intensity.

As for the ISF falloff, you mentioned trying to set the intensity very high at 2 inches. This is just forcing you to guess what setting to use to accomplish what luminance you want at other distances. But various combinations of distance and luminance produce equivalent values that you'd get the same results with at other distance and luminance settings.

For example, the following are identical:

2 Inches 1000%
60 inches 1.1111 %

See what I mean? Whatever you choose for 2 inch luminance will result in 900 times less than that at 5 feet. Similarly, whatever you choose at 5 feet will result in 900 times more luminance at 2 inches. ISF is an approximation that is only accurate at close distances if the light source is an infinitesimal point.

In real life, a flame is not a tiny dimensionless point. It has a definite non-zero volume. In other words, the total energy from the flame is not concentrated in a single point. If the tip of the flame is two inches from the top of the lamp, then all the other parts are more than that. The real-life result is that the local luminance inside the lamp is never 900 times the luminance at 5 feet. But that's what the math here produces.

As a workaround, I suggest that the shader on the lamp be adjusted to produce less diffuse reflection. Instead of a Diffuse_Value at or close to 1, I'd suggest a much smaller fraction. What I'm saying is, get your gamma correction going, get the luminance at 3 feet or greater looking right. Then, decrease the reflectivity of the lamp until you've compensated it enough to look like it is lit by a local 3 dimensional flame, instead of a dimensionless point with infinite light density at the origin.

You will also want to employ some IBL because in a closed environment, the primary light source gets bounced around so that all the objects in the room become secondary light sources for all the other objects in the room. With Poser 8, this is automatic, but you don't have that, so you need to use a very low level IBL to approximate the overall secondary lighting.

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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)