Is it possible to hide the materials for certain objects in my scene? example the instances of an object. i would love to have just the main object show only the materials and the instances not assuming they all use the same materials
It looks like you have it working. So what do you want that's different? If you want the viewport to be faster, select the houses you don't care about seeing in the viewport, go to Object Properties, and enable Display As Box. Or hide them via the Layer Manager. I use the Layer manager extensively for large scenes with…
Do you want to improve performance in the standard Max viewport? Or are you using V-Ray RT? To make the standard viewport faster, I use Layers a lot, and set objects to Box mode whenever possible. Not sure if that's what you need though.