Ive almost finished learning advanced weight mapping in 3ds max for a personal project. After lurking around these forums, eventually making a few posts regarding sprites, suddenly realized making sprites is actually incredibly easy for anyone who already has access to military/scifi models and knows how to rig, map, animate and render. I am one such person, and will soon be rigging and animating my stuff for the personal project I mentioned.
All I have to do is render each animation cycle out as single frame an boom there are your sprites Im certain Goldhawk used a similar process. The only issue here is I dont have access to the original models/textures, so any new sprites would either be from my personal collection or community supplied. I also wouldn't mind making new simple low-poly models specifically for you guys as long as there not a bitch to rig, map an animate.
If all goes according to plan, we could see a substantial number of new custom sprites for weapons, vehicles, armor and enemies. At that point I would step back and let you guys handle the code work if you were up for it.
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Post process of the renders should also be fairly easy when using a Batch Process in Photoshop. http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Batch_Process_Images_in_Photoshop