I've been thinking about this a lot, and I really don't know if this would be considered an issue.

Here's the deal: I want to create a pixel art animation, but what I have right now is traced over a very simple 3D model I created and rendered myself (POV-Ray source here). I tried to render it as neutrally as possible, since all I wanted were the shapes.
The render used a neutral lighting (directly at the top and bottom) so I would still have to figure out highlights and shadows myself on the final piece, and I also rendered the animation with only a simple rotation on the vertical axis, after the model was tilted a bit.

Here are the rendered frames:



After tracing the outlines over that, I animated a back and forth wobble by hand, which looks like this:



So, at this point, the animation looks really smooth and nice, and I'm really excited to work the actual pixel art on it. My plan is to have three light sources, a ray gun at the bottom and lots of other interesting details, so there's still 95% of the work to be done here.

Either way, the whole bit about tracing over the 3D render has been bothering me. I took as many measures as I could to avoid any computer-aided help, besides the actual shape of the saucer in each frame.

The issue with tracing is usually over existing works, which was not really the case here. Still, the 3D renders were computer generated, which might be considered cheating.

So, what would be the consensus?