Working on a small clip and FINALLY figured out most of this process but I still cant figure out how to "render" an animation!  In the sample I finally had her shirt texture placed in preview as well as the sign and they showed up but for the life of me cannot get the hair to show other than than what you see.  am I missing something?...can anyone point me to a tutorial that might help?......I did render it as a movie and it came out fine with sound etc..except for the hair.....same as when I rendered it to single frames.....but I think I'm not getting all the effects I could by setting the textures on preview.  Also does any one have any suggestions for settings when rendering/making an animated movie. I know.....a lot of questions, but thanks for any advice!

When you select Animation->Make Movie, in the dialog box that comes up click on the Quality box and change it to Current Render Setting (as in the attached pic, click it to make it bigger) and then it should render properly.

Other advice would be to render to image files (same dialog box, this time Sequence Type and choose Image Files) as if your render fails halfway through for any reason, you can then resume rendering from the frame it stopped at. You would need to assemble the frames into an animation with another program though and also add the sound after too.