Quick tut on how to setup blender to render models into 2D pixel art, which is useful if you don't want to redraw a character for each frame of their animation, and let's you make use of things blender can automate, like particle simulations.

It's not in the tutorial, but I'd highly recommend using the spritify plugin for blender. Spritify will take your rendered animation and generate a spritesheet from it, within blender. First install imagemagick, then install the spritify plugin for blender.