I think the skew Idea will work, but the "Straight on" image is going to be a killer. Most of my time has been trying to get the draw order, joints & animations to be read from a file. I still need to add 1 last file that will describe "I want this type of mob (humanoid), using these graphics (right_arm = right_arm.png), showing this animation (1h swing) at x,y".
Here is the latest output, I've added a few more mobs, still need to do the arms for the fire giant. I've broken the arms into upper arms and lower arms. I've made it only produce 3 images per frame as well, to make this animated graphic a little more internet friendly.
The left arm's animation is a little wierd. I was trying to demonstrate that it is moving.
Next up:
Cut 'n paste fire giants arms from original artwork so that he will be more complete.
Divide the legs into UPPER_LEG and LOWER_LEG and possibly FOOT if the walking animation looks bad.
Parse a scene.txt file so that I can stop recompliling all the time.

Here is something that I think just looks cool: I was having problems geting the angles to recurse so I made a "worse case scenario" to use for testing:
