Hello,
This might have a quick fix, but I've still got my training wheels on.

I've created a scene in Maya 2012- a hospital ward.
Around the room and pushed back is a large skybox which has clouds and whatnot.. You can see it animating through the windows of my scene.

However,
I need a way to light the skybox without effecting the shadows/lights INSIDE my walls.

An ambient light seems to light it the best way, however it's just flooding the rest of my scene!

Any advice?

I'll post some render shots too

http://imgur.com/a/BF0u8

Some rendered jpegs-

The zoomed out one demonstrates the skybox that I'm working with

If you are just looking to brighten the sky dome you could try using incandesence in the shader attribute editor. Not entirely sure if thats what your trying to achieve though.

Light Link it

Window -> Relationship Editors -> Light Link -> Light-Centric

Select the light on the left panel and DEselect everything but the skybox (should be only blue thing highlighted)

Object Centric is the same but the panels are reversed.

Gah i can't wait to get home to try this. It's due on Friday, I am really loving maya. My teacher got me on to polycount
I'll let you know how many polys my scene is too, but I believe it's under 20000 o:

You saved my bum! Thanks for the tip, my scene looks... yeah. Just a vast improvement

Thank you!

if it still looks dark you can also up the Diffuse attribute on the skybox shader; change the default .8 to something higher

My first Maya model - YouTube

Youtube ate my quality
Any my animation was thrown together literally in the 10 minutes before I rendered it