Got a bit distracted with some good Unity / AR dev work, but now looking at this again and reading about writing (the cool Vandameer book about writing - the author of Annihilation.) As I was doing on Unity, I got interested by the Adventurer Creator add on which looks like a really nice engine/development tool, but in the end, it's probably more heavyweight than what I need and I'm also interested in doing the engine development, so I'm working on the C3 version again. Adventure Creator did give me some inspiration to try 2.5D ('3D characters in 2D maps with Z like Grim Fandango.)
Unity did bring up a nice path for doing an art pipeline based on capturing 3d models w/ animation and creating 2D sprites. I did a couple quick tests and I 'll think I'll go with it.
Basically, download Unity, buy the Sprite Baking Studio asset, some 3D model assets and it's pretty nicely automated to generate a bunch of sprite sheets using different camera angles.
Here's a quick example (not really integrated into the background and the movement timing is off but gives some idea of the animation/sprite generation quality.)