I've been thinking about making a small and simple RPG now for a while, but one major obstacle is that I need some free, or free for non-commercial use, animated models. I know that if I have to go with "programmer's art", the project is doomed right there. My programmer's art is the real deal, I can barely draw a UFO in 2D. I've tried to google a bit but only managed to come up with either free static models with obscene poly counts or, much more frequently, web sites full of nothing. Basically I'd like some humanoid models with a few basic animations such as idle, walk, run, jump and maybe attack. Preferably something of decent quality, and in some fairly standard, or atleast convertable, format. Any info of where something like this can be found would be greatly appreciated.

http://www.turbosquid.com/

Check the prices at TurboSquid. Ive only looked around a little
(mostly trying to find free models) as Im not at that point in my large
project yet. The animation aspect fills me with trepidation as I intend to have hundreds for human figures and creating them myself sounds like a very tedious job. (Maybe by the time I get to it they will have more standards
and free/cheap animation assets available -- or better tools to create them).

I needed a lot of models but wanted to put more time into programming and music, so I basically worked hard on a base human and made sure his rig etc. could be reused, then made derived models with different clothes and heads and so on. You can get the original model I made from the game site in my signature.

Thanks for your answers!

Here's some more free animated models I found if anyone is interested:

http://www.psionic3d.co.uk/cgi-bin/imageFolio.cgi?direct=Free Stuff/3D Models

EDIT: Clickable link.