1. Typically there are less than 360 directions. Common case is 8 or 16. Animations are quite short too.

2. **Automation is your friend.** Write a Blender/3DMax/etc script to load a model from the list, render it in every required frame and direction to an image. Tag images according to content and address them from the game.

3. Pack everything into atlases for faster access.

In the end, you will end up with several throusands of sprites, neatly packed into just dozen of atlases. Not such a big deal ;)