3D renderer should support Sprites, including animation

When designing 2D games, one often wants to use external software such as Blender to build rigged & animated characters.
Currently, a Blender file is loaded as a collection of textured meshes, and is therefore only visible when using a 3D camera (2D camera could also render it looking at it from the z-axis, I'm not sure why it doesn't do it).

However, when the switch to the 3D camera is made, all the sprites and other 2D objects stop working. This behaviour is not acceptable for 2D games, which potentially use Tilemaps and sprites.

I think either 3D rendering should support rendering sprites, or 2D rendering should support rendering textured meshes *or* some other way of importing rigged animations from Blender. This is especially true since the majority of crates out there that work with 2D maps/tilemaps load them as sprites.

Combining 3D and 2D cameras is of course not a solution here, since objects might be intertwined along the z axis.