My two cents about this:
Creating a model from scratch + animations is a hell of work, unless you royally pay thousands of $$ a professional. In the past, me and Etoprostoya ripped about 250 3D models from various games and created full package for Heroes 3.
I think that taking already done 3D models, add slight modifications to bones + animations, then redo textures in H3 style would take much less time, and for a better result.
Small examples which could fit very well with a bit of work (well, in my opinion):
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/7124/sorc.gifhttp://a.imageshack.us/img827/8765/arch.gif
http://a.imageshack.us/img713/4130/an1.gifhttp://a.imageshack.us/img826/8302/sat.gif
http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/7646/dragonl.gifhttp://a.imageshack.us/img337/6949/hypo2.gif
http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/2686/lion.gif
heroescommunity.com/viewthread.php3?TID=35781
Here there are screen-shots with all work done + download link. Most of them have nothing to share with Heroes textures, but textures and animations can be changed without much work by someone comfortable with 3DS max.
