I've been trying to make 3D rendered sprites that look like hand-drawn 2D sprites for a while. I finally got this result which I'm pretty happy with:
the model which I made in MakeHuman because I don't want to waste my time modeling and rigging a generic human:
What's going on is I'm multiplying these different maps together in the compositor:
Depth:
AO:
Lighting: (dot product from the normal map)
It's basically being shaded completely in the compositor.