Was gonna ask this on /3/ but that board is dead lol. Anyway.

That's called Paper Mario

>>59532876
paper mario are 2D sprites.

I mean something like Spriter but in 3D.

>>59532907
I mean as early as Wolf 3D you essentially have sprite based characters that can turn around and walk away from the player. Those were action-states though, if you look at the game's code, they weren't dependent on the angle at which the player was looking at them.

Doom has what (I think) you're talking about, where an enemy (or any entity) can idle and the player can walk around them and the sprite will change based on the angle the player is looking at them and the orientation of the enemy-object. That's pretty easy to do, but I'm not entirely sure if that's what you're looking for.

>>59532954
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-lDwfIix28

basically this but in 3D

>>59532981
You could just make a full set of body parts for each person, give them an orientation and some modification states (raised, etc) and then do them from at least 4 angles (8 if you want to work your ass off), and then just have a multi-component enemy that rotates its body parts based on each of their orientations and the camera's angle.

That's a hell of a lot of spritework, at that point I'd just recommend working on 3D modelling. It's not so hard.

>>59533093
you still don't get it.

that type of animation is not hard at all, and is easier than working in 3D.

>>59532981
wtf does that even mean, the 3D equivalent would be 3ds, maya or blender

>>59533198
they're focused on 3D meshes, not 2D workflow

>>59532754
Everything 2D these days is made on 3D engines.
>Unity2D

Look into how Game & Watch was created in Melee. He's not a sprite, but a one pixel thick 3D model. His animations are choppy to mimic his original game, but you can map other characters' moves to him and he will move smoothly because of this. Sounds like what you want to do.