Hi all. My apologies for the crude rendering. I’ve only been using blender for a few days. 
My ceiling is an exact duplicate of my walls. Same material, etc. I even copied and pasted the wall and just rotated around to use like a ceiling. Why is it that my ceiling is coming out blackish? Ive spent over an hour playing around with the lamp and can’t seem to make it where it can broadcast light in a general area all around.
That amount of information is not going to cut it.
Prepare a test file with the room and lights and replace couch and some of the tables with cubes. Rest of it you can leave out. Then upload to http://www.pasteall.org/blend/ and share the link.
Or at very least post screenshots of your setup, without cropping any part of blender window out (except personal information) and keep the original resolution.
There are many reasons the ceiling can look like that, like material not properly assigned, there’s not enough light directed to it (in Blender render there’s no bounced light affecting everything like in Cycles), material not properly set, wrong settings for lights, or mesh problem.
Check the direction of the normals for the ceiling. It’s likely pointing up instead of down (which is likely what you want).
Since you’ve only been using Blender for a few days:
That will show you which direction the normals are facing. If you’re still having trouble seeing them, drag the Size slider to the right of the icons to make them longer (or shorter, if that helps).
If the normals are pointing up (which I suspect is the problem), go to the “T” side-panel (the left hand side of the 3D View; hit ‘t’ if it’s not showing) and under Mesh Tools, look for the Normals panel. Flip Direction should fix your problem.
Several objects have delta scale set. It should be (XYZ) 1,1,1 and you have to fix those if you want to apply the object scale at any point. You can right click on the fields and select “reset all to default values”.
Many objects in the scene doesn’t have a material. You can set material to multiple objects by selecting the objects, the one with the correct material last (active selection) and ctrl+L -> materials.
You’ve set specular intensity in the materials to 1 and hardness to 8. Those should be more like 0.18 and 15-20 for clay, 0.25 and 20-60 for “normal” materials. Hardness increases for highly reflective materials that have sharp reflections, but intensity usually stays quite low despite that.
For lighting, you have to pretty much fake everything when using Blender render.
A point light emits light from a single point like the name says, and a (clear) lightbulb on its own would be the close real life equivalent to that, so it’s not very useful for general lighting. It works good as a accent light.
You could separate lights to ones that are set not to cast shadows but lights the scene (area/spot lamps) and then add lamps that only cast shadows, depending on what kind of lights the scene will have. You could also try environment lighting in the world properties for ambient lighting.
For example in this I’ve put the room to its own layer, objects in it to their own, and the ceiling on the third layer.
You asked about the ceiling so I put two area lights that only affect it because those lights are on the same layer and “this layer only” option is on.
I also put a wide cone spot light in the middle of the room that casts shadows and this makes the lighting appear as if there was only one light source. It also has increased soft shadow size. There’s also one area light in the back that is on first and second layer (M -> shift select layers) and “this layer only” option is on.
This is the result (which has obvious problems but you get the idea) http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=59337
And here’s the file Office_help_ja12.blend (894 KB)
JA12, thank you very much! Obviously, I still have much to learn about lighting, but the look you achieved is exactly what I was looking for. I’ll start reading up on how to manage layers, but the lighting control makes more sense now. Stick my ceiling in a layer with its own light in the same layer so said light doesnt affect lighting of anything else.
