Hi Richard,
I have to agree with Ren and Patrick on this one.
I'm surprised that you prefer rendering in Poser - your gallery shows you've put some time and effort into Cararra Studio, lots of cool sci-fi stuff in there.
Have you seen Shonner's skin tutorial: http://www.shonner.com/drafts/carrara_skin_tutorial_a.htm
Its good stuff, and Carrara 5 should come with a sample skin/SSS shader to mess around with. The Operator functions (add, multiply, overlay, mixer & subtract) in the texture room are what you need to start mixing and matching stuff.

And if you are a bit stuck with lighting(?) - put your scenes into one of the pre built scenes that comes with Cararra (remove the original models & textures) and see how that comes out. Theres a lot of useful lighting rigs and environments that are included to get people started.

Personally, I've always thought Poser plays poorly with other software - Poser (5 & 6) has a great texture room, but you can't bake the textures you create and then export them in to other software. So for me there's just no point in learning it or using any textures unless they are bitmap files that I can mess around with in Photoshop. Just my 0.02 on the issue.
I think I've said more than enough, its someone elses turn now ;)