I am currently working on a project as Design Director to create a online multiple player Flash RPG. You can check out the game at the mentioned site, but be warned the actual game only has programmer art. My question is: Would it be worth the extra effort to model and animate every character in 3d then save the animation in subsequent .jpg format and import it all into flash? The isometric engine we are using currently supports 30x60 tiles with no restrictions on the height.

That's possibly a good idea, I did a game that used animated gifs that were rendered animation. Transparency was an issue but I worked around the problems, but that wasn't flash.
Flash doesn't compress transparency very well does it? Do some experiments to see how big the filesize, and ram would be with large numbers of such images.

Thanks, for the info. We will defiantly have to test it out if we decide to go that route.

At the moment though, I am more curious on whether or not it is worth the time and effort to model and animate every NPC and Character rather then creating sprites. I am not a modeller so I really do not have much idea on the time it takes to model, texture, and animate a good model.

From what I do know, I think it would actually be more beneficial to model and animate because you do not have to go through and draw every animation sequence for the sprite. Which may also open up more doors for more fluid motion and extended animations.

I realize that when we export into a smaller file compression such as a gif or a jpg we will lose some of our quality. Im curious though if that quality is better or just as good as doing the sprite in photoshop.

Now there is a program called Swift 3d that allows you to model, animate and export models in the vector graphics that are used to display 3d in flash. I do not know for sure though if we can use this technology because we do not want any download requirements. This would be another testing issue.

It depends on many factors, but my estimation is that drawing bitmaps could easily take 100 times as long as modeling and animating. This is as if you have a method of rendering everything like a script, and you don't count render time etc. Maybe someone else will say that that's nuts and bitmaps are faster.

Quality is exacly the same from different programs (well it's supposed to be.)