Lighting Issues

I am having a lot of problems lighting my interior set. I added materials and textures to my models. I set up a directional light as my sunlight and an area light as my photon emitter. But for some reason, it doesn't work. No matter how much I increase the photon value, the render still remains dark. Then I decided to take off the sunlight and use two area lights, one for emission and one for sunlight. Still did not work. Don't understand why. Having a bad day already and this is making it worse.

So what I did was used one area light as both sunlight and photon emitter and placed it behind the two windows and stretched it to fit the size of the two windows. Well, here's the render but it's still screwed up as you can see:

I don't understand why there is so much light between the two windows when the area light is behind the windows and is set to caste raytrace shadows. I decided to change the position of the light and went onto to doing a night scene.

For this, I modeled a light bulb and added a point light to it. I made sure that the bulb was set to not receive or cast any shadows in the scene so that the light can pass through it. I used this point light as my photon emitter also. However, when I tried to render, the photon emission went about a quarter way before it got hung there. I tried reducing the photon energy, yet the problem persisted. I even changed the point light to an area light, yet it didn't work. Very frustrating. So I just decided to use Final Gather to render the image and see what it looks like.

No, I'm still not happy with it. There is hardly any indirect illumination. Very frustrating and bad day, so I decided to close down Maya and continue working on it tomorrow.