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| There are four entries under <Render> in the menu bar to start a calculation of an image or an animation. For fast access four buttons corresponding to these functions can be found in the button strip directly above the viewports. You can start picture calculations at any time in each work mode simply by pressing one of these buttons or by operating the corresponding shortcuts, depicted in the button images.
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Render Scene (Short cut 'S')
| The <Render Scene> button causes a re-draw of the scene in the render window and does not differ from the output in the camera viewport, except that now the size of the rendered picture is adapted to that entered in the Render Options dialog. The picture size can be independent of the maximum screen-resolution and independent of your current viewport size. However, if you render a picture in which the length/ height relationship differs from the length/ height relationship of the viewport, details of the picture rendered for the file are automatically somewhat different from than those shown in the viewport.
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Render Final (short cut 'F')
| When you operate the <Render Final> button your picture is calculated in scanline mode or with the high quality raytracing-algorithm with regard to the settings planned in the material-, light- and render options dialog. Depending on the hardware available, the complexity of the scene and the depiction mode used, the calculation of the picture can take from a few seconds to several hours.
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Render Scene Animation (short cut 
+ 'S')
| Corresponding to <Render Scene>, but this time a whole animation is calculated. An entire animation with many individual pictures and a complex scene can conceivably require several hours to days to render, depending on the speed of your computer and the rendering parameters (resolution, antialiasing, reflection etc). You can try out the settings for the materials and the background lighting simply by rendering a control-picture. What a waste of time it is if, after a day of animation rendering, you find that the chosen camera or object movement is not what you anticipated. A simple preview rendering would have been helpful here.
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Render Final Animation (short cut + 'F')
| The final rendering process in scanline or raytracing mode for a whole animation is started.
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| The rendering is made in an external render window with its own menu bar. Pictures can be saved after rendering with help of the menu function "File - Save Picture as..." (as .bmp, .jpg, .png, .pcx or .tga files) - animations can be saved via the corresponding menu entries as AVI-videos or picture sequences.
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| After completing the rendering of an animation the calculated video will automatically start to play in the render window. You can even pick out individual pictures of the film by stopping the video at the required points and then saving the window content again via "Save Picture as....".
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| A new picture calculation overwrites the last rendered picture but not the last rendered animation. The menu entry "File - Show animation" will get back the animation in the render window. Only a new animation calculation will overwrite the old one.
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| The render window in action - from the left to the right you can see in the status bar:
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| render time | approximated remaining time | frame number | and the progress bar for the current rendered picture.
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| You can interrupt the rendering process by pressing the "ESC" button, via the menu function "File - Stop Rendering" or just by closing the render window.
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When the render window has been closed, minimized or simply lies below the main window you can restore the render window and its content simply by selecting  in the button strip or choosing the "File - Show last rendered picture/animation" entry in the menu bar (of course minimized windows can be also restored by selecting the corresponding button in the Windows task bar). To bring the main window to top again, just press the "ESC"-key.
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