@sinbad @eniko honestly at that point, I'd seriously consider just hopping to PS1 aesthetic. A lot of your skills transfer (PS1 texturing is functionally pixel art), and if you just learn basic 3D animation it's easy to handle the level of animation required by the aesthetic.
You basically gotta do all that anyways for sprites 3D. Might as well skip the "and then render back down to 2D" and just do the sprite-style 3D enviro + PS1 folks tooling around in it or whatever.