newbie lighting question on emissive function

I'm fairly happy w/ the lighting of this scene so far, but I'm unable to get the overhead lights to "glow" w/ an emissive material- the white color is brighter but it's not casting a glow around the fixture. I followed a tutorial that directed to make everything Static which didn't help either. Also, the white ceiling stays dark no matter what I do- is there a way of linking lights to only illuminate one object, like light linking in Maya? I checked the normals and they are OK. Thank you

 

I discovered that merely inserting another Directional light w/o Shadows on the floor and pointing up towards the ceiling illuminates the ceiling. Anyone have advice on how to make an object (like a recessed ceiling light) glow by using an emissive material?

 

What you're talking about is fundamental to the basics of 3D rendering / shading.

Basically, lighting is expensive. One answer to glowing stuff is to bake static lights onto the textures.

So you bake a directional light for your outdoor scene with 10,000 trees but now you can't move the sun around (cough, well you can but the shadows aren't really there. That is what color the ground is now.)

Computer memory gets good.

So you just bake that light from every possible angle, and then let the computer interpolate, or blend. That's Unity's Global Illumination feature, and it can pick up any number of spot lights. So to get the effect you want you'll need GI and spot lights as well as emission on the surface itself.

This is all established technique, what's good about Unity isn't that you can set up a GI scene with no real experience; it's that the manual tells you how to.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/StandardShaderMaterialParameterEmission.html
https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GIIntro.html

How you light your game is one of the major determining factors in how you will implement your art assets, or should be; that this is not considered more thoroughly is part of why many indie games don't achieve a consistent aesthetic.

edit: or I guess just because we cobble S*** together now lol