I've tried before to add new character sprites by manually editing the existing ones or creating new ones by coloring every pixel... It is tedious, mind numbing work, I don't recommend it.

A couple of days ago I stumbled upon an animation tutorial on youtube for Blender and I decided to give it a try. I looked for a free 3d model on the internet, downloaded Blender and started watching tutorials.

A bunch of tutorials that I found useful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGvalWG8HBU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-wQ8nRWTBs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd5RT8rEPqU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ko9keEqc08

This is what I came up with, very, very rough first try but much better than anything I did before.
https://youtu.be/fkH0rJ2a2Eo

So far I only made the walking and strafing animation, but the rest of them should be much easier to do. There where some problems I had to deal with, like wasting an entire day trying to figure out why the armature doesn't want to parent with the 3d model (the helmet was the problem, so I replaced it with one from another model) or trying to figure out how to create the sidestepping animation, I spend dozens of minutes in front of a mirror trying to recreate my movement pattern. Of course I'm limited to what I can find on the internet, I don't know how to 3d model or texture and I don't have time to learn and practice that stuff.

I'll see if there will be more to this Star Wars mod but I will release the stormtrooper character as a simple mod once it's fully working.