Indigo's post on the space game prompted me to post this here (even though all the links seem dead so I couldn't see the game or the screenies)
Anyhoo a while ago I worked on this tower defence game that combined painted bgs with pixel art characters and 3d vehicles. Oh and photo-sourced user interface.
Sounds terrible but in fact it turned out pretty decent, imo. Worth noting is the texture style we used to get the renders to match the pixel art look. Quite simple stuff, no shading (all shading drawn in textures) and some sharpening and an outline added in post-proc.
The coder made a very nice writeup on polycount, you can read the entire thing here:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=104560Here's a little preview:


The textures are not pixel art at all but rather pixel-art informed freehand photoshopping. Time was super-scarce so everything had to be done very quickly.
For example, all the sprites have 4-frame running cycles.
Hit me up if you have any questions, I'd be glad to share.