Doing character models is going to be RIDICULOUS.
Sorry, you're wrong. Making one character model would take the same ammount of work as making a good quality sprite, that would work well in a 3d environment. Adding each animation/state to a sprite based system would take the same amount of time as the first one. With skeleton based models, each animation would take 10-15 minutes to look good, and you can use the same animation for
every hummanoid in the game.
Let's do the math:
10 hummanoid models
10 states
== 100 sprites to draw.
or
10 character models
10 skeleton animations
== 20 "work units"
Sprites are good if you need variety, and don't require animations. When you do, it becomes an excersise in futility to manage the endless combinations.
With 3d models you only need to do everything once. 1 model per character, 1 animation per state (walking, sleeping, fighting etc.), even 1 model per carried/worn item. By the wonders of skeleton based animation, everything can be combined to form the final visual representation of a character doing something, while wearing some things. With sprites, you'd have to draw each and every combination by hand, increasing not only the workload, but also memory requirements.
Rember, 1 character model in memory + texture + skeletal animation equals roughly 3 sprites at decent resolution. But while adding variety to 3d models gives a linear progression of memory use, the same progression raised to the power of "degrees of combination" for sprites.
I'm not saying sprites are out of the question, but I'd think they would only be useful as placeholders in the beginning. As the content would get added, the benefits would quickly be outweighted by the problems described above.
Ciehoo