Material visible in render preview but not in main render...

Did you make it non-renderable in the outliner?

Like williamatics already said, that is the only thing I can think of:

williamatics , spikeyxxx  , wow yeah... I am dumb ,  as I said in my post , it would be something silly...... I was just so frustrated at it that I didn't even think. Strange thing is , I ran this render fine yesterday but today I tweaked a few things in the material and re-rendered and that's when the issue arose , but in that time I had no reason to disable the render and don't remember doing so..... 

Thanks guys! 

frikkr Maybe you accidentally disabled it from your Object Properties tab instead, since you're on that tab in the screenshot? In the visibility section of that tab, you can disable in viewports, renders and selectable.

Ahh , I did not know about that , thanks!

frikkr that is an awesome piece of text, by the way.Did you make that in a different software and import it into blender to extrude it and texture it?

Thanks man , it's actually a font I bought for commercial use and then extruded, re-meshed and textured . It is for the point and click adventure game that I am making. I can't show too much at the moment but I will be posting a development log in this forum soon once the website goes live , but here is the text in the games logo (cropped to keep things under wraps for now) :

Wow..................if only I had your skills already haha. That looks sweet!!!!

I too am on my own game dev journey but I need more modeling/texturing experience. I think the animating parts won't be terrible as I picked that up really easy. I'm trying to get better at my weak areas.

I'm looking forward to your dev log

Thanks :) , not sure when the dev log will be up , but hopefully in the next couple of months max. 

Is your game the one with the team of pigs? I'm sure that will be pretty cool. If you picked up animating easy then you have the hardest part out of the way so i'm sure you will get the hang of modelling and texturing soon , especially with all the awesome tutorials and help available on CGC!

Good luck with it.

Yeah the WarHogz are one team. Masked Tribals are another, Grateful Undead are another, Rabbidz are another team, Frogs are another, maybe Robots for another. Most of these are still in 2D or in my mind still. I got most of the tribal team modeled in low poly but I am not terribly happy with them currently. There will be roughly 5-6 characters per team. It will be turn-based gameplay. I bought a few turnbased frameworks in Unity and they are easy enough to impement basic movement/combat/victory conditions. I think I have those parts roughly down. But the modeling and texturing are definitely my weakness, It seems to be really fun to figure out but it takes so much time and creative juice haha.

I've got a long way to go. This is more of a hobby so I have to dream big and play small haha.

You'll get there mate , and as-long as you are enjoying it then it doesn't really matter how long it takes. 

Personally I am the other way round, I am happy with my modelling and texturing in regards of quality for the game , but when it comes to Unity/coding I am clueless and learning very slowly!