Hi
Thanks Michael for the link to SimLab Composer, it has been a real eye opener for me.

I'm posting the following postscript to my questions in case anybody else is as ignorant of the basics as me and struggling with Carrara and Daz Studio.

Carrara and blender both mess up the mesh from Moi and give very disappointing results. If a model has custom vertex smoothing both Carrarra and Daz Studio will fail to display a smooth model.

I have never managed to export a model from Carrara complete with material and texture maps and it certainly does not produce anything as elegant at the Obj and Collada exports form SimLab.

On the other hand SimLab is able to import objects form Moi and export them as objects complete with textures. Exported collada files also import into Daz Studio and need only minor tweaking of the shaders.

The lesson for me is that for a beginner on a budget Moi and SimLab are an excellent choice save a awful lot of wasted time and frustration.

Once again thanks Michael for making Moi and being so helpful.

I made the attached today and rendered it in Daz Studio using iray.