Posted to the Carrara forum on the Daz boards, though I doubt anyone finds the vicissitudes of my creative process that riveting:
After initial excitement and installation of Carrara 8.5, I hit a wall last month when it seemed like someone’s materials weren’t applying correctly. Well, the materials were actually fine, though there were duplicate shaders. I was just looking at the scene in a view that was NOT texture shaded. Once I figured that out, everything looked much better!

I haven’t been in Carrara much these days because I’ve been doing lots of back-end preparations.

1) I reduced the size of the G2F file by removing unused morphs. It definitely loads faster now.

2) I’m in the midst of modifying textures for my G2F versions of my characters so that they match the G3F base textures in tone and detail.

3) I made some custom textures for Ravenhair’s G2F Casual Jeans and T-Shirt for everyone to wear.

4) I encountered poke-through and Carrara’s lack of smoothing modifiers.

5) I added the ExpandAll morph to Casual Jeans and T-Shirts to override pokethrough.

6) I decided to forego morph-based or plugin-based solutions to pokethrough in favor of a 100% reliable solution: second skin clothing. That’s something I’ve been wanting to do for a while anyway.

7) I discovered all of zero paid or freebie options for second skin clothing based on the V5 UVs [which all my characters are using], so, after a frustration digression with my V3[!]-based Clother by Zew, Texture Converter 2 by 3DUniverse, and Daz Studio’s Map Transfer function, I realized that I wouldn’t get satisfactory results from either V3- or V4-based second skins. I had to make my own.

8) I scanned my jeans, as well as my shirt, last night, downloaded SnowSultan’s V5 seam guides, and began filling in the maps with cut and pasted elements from the scans. I now have a waistline, fly, front and back pockets, and belt loops for the jeans, as well as a hemline for the shirt. The neckline is in progress.