I am sorry, I am only in my second week developing in Daz 3D. I placed the house, then placed the furniture. Is that what you mean by applying the materials? If not, how would I go about applying materials to the house to be able to delete things like walls (which are getting in the way of shots I want to do)?
Basically: The items in Daz are divided mainly in two categories - figures and props. The figures are items which can be changed inside the program without need to work on mesh level, the props are items which cannot be changed without working directly with the mesh. The figures has this sign
, the props are marked with this sign
. The props can be turned into figures and the figures can be turned into a props. The figures can changed by posing and morphs. Morphs are used to change the shape of a figure w/o changing the number of mesh polygons, and posing is changing the position of only parts of the figure w/o changing the number of polygons. Figures are not only human or animal etc figures but usually hairs, clothing and shoes (to clarify - when you load inside the program something called a figure it is usually a human or animal figure, while hair is called hair etc; but when using the menu Edit you will see there "Objects" and "Figures". I think (but will not bet my salary on this) that the "objects" are items which cannot be changed and "Figures" are the items which can be changed). So figured to be able to be posed they need "bones" (the sign is like a real bone). When you select any item and click on the tab Parameters you will see every item can be moved, rotated and scaled. But if the figure has "bones" you can select only a certain bone and when clicking on the tab properties will show only the bone itself can be moved, rotated, twisted etc. Of course the whole part of the figure which is "governed" by the selected "bone" will move, rotate and twist together with the bone.
The house you loaded had "bones", don't know why the creator added them but having bones means it should be possible to transform those parts in some way. You cannot delete only a bone as this will delete the corresponding part of the figure and obviously this will not be anymore the same figure. But if you need for the redering purposes you can make a bone (together with the corresponding part) invisible.
As for materials - most of the items for Daz are created from two parts - the structure (actually the model's mesh) - look it as to a bare wall, and the materials (actually the appearance) - look at it as the paint upon this wall. So you *must* load the structure itself at first, and after that you may decide to put materials (appearance) upon those models, but you of course may decide to leave it as it is especially because most of the model already have some appearance applied on it by default.
In your case the model (the structure) is the whole house with the bones (select some bone and click on the Parameters tab to see of this bone can be moved in some way together with the whole wall or window or door or whatever this bone controls, and only after that you can apply a material (most of the models have more then one material preset readied).
Well, hope this helps
Edit: You can render from the viewport directly but to be able able to render in small rooms you can create cameras from Create menu. You can play with the camera parameters but better look for some tutorial then. The drawback of creating a camera for indoor rendering is you usually will need to add lights.
