The Shining Source

OK so some of you will have seen my past attempts at graphical creation, sprites and attack animations(2D), and devlyn may remember some battle backgrounds I made for him once upon a time.
The battle backgrounds are easily the best thing I've made in my mind(artistically).
However I cheated.

I was using a 3D building program at the time that provided easy to use elements to build environments of your choosing, you resized the elements, slammed on a texture or two and you had a forest or something.
Then I'd just take a screenshot of it.

What is the deal with this sort of thing?

I was thinking about my recent experience with the game spore, and considered that given a skeletal creation addon to maya or something i could probably whip up characters fairly quickly after the first one..., which when screenshotted in action and sized down for pixel graphics could look much better than what I'd otherwise make.

comments?

OK so I tried one quickly and it didn't take long: creature creator from fxrsoft:
here's my first creature
you can then save it as 3ds format, take it into 3ds max and manipulate it for textures, movement for the attack animation, whatever.

And another to show how quick it is now.
Hmm.

Cool!

How easy is it to texture and animate those things? I assume once you have an animated model, you can render it to a set of images to be used in a 2D game. I still like making pixel art, but it takes ages and it's not really a strength of mine. Then again, I suck at making 3D models too

Not sure, but I'll let you know.  I'm definitely keen to make a couple for a pipe dream anyway.