I am just starting to work with poser. I have trouble keeping my characters clothes. When I save and later load again, pants are gone for instance.

Is there a special step to "lock "clothes which I miss?

I also try to import scenes into CARRARA 5. It works with a not so good definition but clothes are strange (poorly fit with legs appearing at places for instance?)

Naturally I use the corresponding items (Mikki and Mikki clothes for instance...)

Well if anyone has a clue I would be happy to help on other softwares (photoshop, Premiere etc..)

Mempremagog

I'm just past the novice stage myself. Basically there are 3 kinds of clothes:

1. Conforming (load from the Library, then do 'Figure > Conform To' and select the figure)
2. Dynamic (can drape and fold more realistically) is actually a prop, so load and do 'Figure > Set Figure Parent or Object', to make the clothing a child attached to the parent object - the figure or body part.
3. Props like glasses, shoes, etc. work the same way.

I recommend the "Practical Poser 6' Book by Denise Tyler here at Renderosity in the Marketplace. I got a lot from it - still am...

_jc  'Art Head Start' e-book: Learn digital art skills $19.95
'Art Head Start.com Free chapter, Vue tutorials, models, Web Tutorials Directory.

How, and what do you save?
If you click save or save as from the menu, you save (as) a .pz3 file. This is a poser scene and it contains all items in the scene. Meaning the character, its textures, its clothes, their textures, background props, architecture,...

as for carrara I cannot help you as I use C4D.

You need to post more detail of exactly what you are doing.

If you save a scene file , it should save everything in the scene. You can open the heirarchy editor window to see whats there.

it is remotely possible that something in the scene is being loaded to its base position rather than where you believe it should be.

It sounds as though the items are not being conformed properly in Poser, as per what jc said above.   Figures imported to Carrara should not poke through their clothes, if they don't poke through in Poser.   One thing I have found with Transposer, though, is that a scene may be imported incomplete.   I think it is a memory issue.   Then, if you make an update in Poser and try to update the scene in Carrara, Carrara gives an error and may actually delete a figure from the existing scene.   Transposer imports what is visible in the scene, so, if an item of clothing, for instance, has been hidden in Poser, it won't be included in the import.

One thing to determine would be if it happened on all Poser products, or just a few.

Denise points out in her book that some Poser merchants don't properly set their figures to a totally zero pose before they build clothing - so that when you load a figure, it is not posed exactly the same as the clothes. One would expect this to show up in Poser, but it does go to show that clothing makers make mistakes, just like the rest of us, and some of those get by the product testers.