Dining Hall... help!!!

Thank you for the very imformative reply Fletch. I am still really new to this whole thing and find some of the intricate settings overwhelming. I wasnt sure if the radius setting had any effect on ies lights. I thought they carried all of their own information and changing this setting wouldnt make any difference... Is that true of the multiplier setting for ies lights? The radius setting was .5 so I am changing it to .001 and re rendering.

Thank you very much for the tips on workflow as well. You are right. That will be very helpful. I use an ies viewer I found somewhere but it is difficult to tell how the light will react in a specific room. I will try testing them in a box the size of my room.

One last question about the placement of the actual light. I feel that there is no exact science to this. A slight movement up or down could make a huge difference and yet I am never exactly sure where to place them. For example, I modeled the lights on the ceiling in the view. In sketchup, I choose the lowest most point of the fixture for an insertion point and then pick a point down in the z axis. Then I usually move the light down about 2" so I dont have any interference. Would this be the correct technique for a light such as the one in my view. When I first tried this rendering, I put a fake emitter on the fixture itself so it would light white, but the model had so many verticies that rendering times were significant.

Anyway. Enough rambling. Thanks so much for the help!

normally IES lights should be set to power of 1.
but some render really dim for some reason... may be a bug happening in the proggie creating the IES, or may be that the IES is for a dim or small light such as a desk lamp or something... but if it's dim, and you like it but want it brighter, well, by all means, feel free to increase it... but if then the light output is 'wrong' well, you can't complain to me