i am finding that poser lights dont seem to work in carrara, skydomes have no texture and the carra skies dont want to seem to work unless they are part of a carrara scale scene rather than poser scale, i have also tried importing a prelit scene from ds4.5 into the beta carra 8.5, but no matter what render settings i use i get a pretty much black or dark gray scale skydome. Any work around for this please?

If you are using a sun or infinite light, the sky dome is shading it, in other words you are working in the shadow of the sky dome.  If you want to use the sky dome, use an infinite light pointed straight up and set it to illuminate only the sky dome.  The scene would have to be illuminated by an infinite light set to ignore the sky dome (illuminate everything except).

Depending on the sky dome (I have used several in the past but don't bother generally any more) you may have to to into the shader and use the map you want as the color node.

I generally use realistic skies combined with a sun light for outdoor scenes.  You have to turn the sun light on in render settings, but usually I leave it off until rendering as I don't want a recalculation of lights for every quick look in the assembly room.

I would need more info regarding why a sky preset doesn't work with a poser scale (by which I assume you mean small) scene.  I have not experienced problems with this.

If any of this doesn't make sense, let me know.

Klebnor