raptorus,

Thanks!

Yes, I coded this alone.  I started in January 2010, so not even 1 year so far.

Here's how I render those sprites:

1. First I animate the model facing one direction.  In Blender all the animations are on one timeline.

2. Next, I have a Python script I wrote that I run inside Blender.  This renders each frame of the animation then rotates the scene 45 degrees.  It does this 8 times to get all 8 directions.  I run this in Blender 2.49, have not tried this yet in Blender 2.5

3. The result is lots of individual images.  I then use ImageMagick "montage" to combine them into one image.  Example: montage -background "transparent" -geometry 128x128 -tile 32x8 output.png

The Python script:

import Blender
from Blender import *
from Blender.Scene import Render
pi = 3.14159
deg45 = 45 * pi / 180
context = Scene.GetCurrent().getRenderingContext()
basePath = context.renderPath
for i in range(1,9):
    # objects without parents should be parented to RenderPlatform
    platform = Object.Get('RenderPlatform')
    platform.RotZ = platform.RotZ - deg45
    platform.setLocation(platform.getLocation()) # refreshes the child locations
    context.renderPath = basePath + str(i)
    context.renderAnim()
    Blender.Redraw()
context.renderPath = basePath

Hm, I don't have 3D Studio Max so I'm not sure.  But if it allows scripting it should be possible.

Blender can import 3DS files but I don't know if it handles armatures, animations, etc.  It might only do static meshes.