Hi everyone
Thanks for being so helpful. I learned more today than I would in weeks of trawling as when I do a search its just chance that some answered my question in the past. I used SimLab and all the things I have discarded look a lot better than I thought possible, and where there are problems I can understand why; in most cases at least.

Chipp the stuff you posted really helped too and has given me some perspective. A lot of you who have spent a career doing this stuff amaze me because you know and do things I don't even know are possible.

BurrMan, I stumbled across people talking about Daz turning towards selling assets and no longer supporting Carrara, which if true makes me sad. It does a huge amount of stuff but the renders I can produce (that looked cool to me when I started) are poor compared to the ones regularly posted here. When Michael told me about the problems with smoothing I upgraded to 8.5 and found the import of 3dm to be present but had no better smoothing than the standard version. I assume that there are more people who want and are able to pose girls in bikinis with hefty swords than people who want to make models. My guess is that Cararra is going to be just another way of posing genesis and 89.7 smoothing (or whatever it is) works best.

To be honest I'm well into uninformed speculation now so will leave you all in peace until my next ill informed venture causes me difficulty.
Many thanks
Keith