Render only on keypress

I want to be able to press a key, say W and have the character move forward. I then want to produce a render of the character at the new position, which I can then put into a byte array and send somewhere else.

I do not want to have the camera continuously rendering. I want to control the moment rendering starts (IE: the moment I press a key or the moment a UPD message arrives with the key to press).

Please, how can I do this?

Enabled cameras automatically render every frame. But if you disable a camera you can then explicitly control it to render a single frame by calling Camera.Render: Unity - Scripting API: Camera.Render