My game's characters are made up of different parts (head/body/legs/etc), and whatever items they have equipped. As I'm creating the animation system for my game, I want to try to anticipate a large number of combinations for different pieces for each character. Originally, I had planned on having a frame-by frame animation for each piece for each animation, and then layer them to combine them into a character, but this seems like it would be a lot of work for my artist, and that the memory/disk size would start to add up as well since we would need a sprite for every frame, of every customization of every piece, in every animation, for every character.

What efficient ways are there to create/implement these animations as we add more and more configurations to our game?

Edit: I'll also point out that my artist is using flash to make the graphics and animations, but the game is in Java.

My game's characters are made up of different parts (head/body/legs/etc), and whatever items they have equipped. As I'm creating the animation system for my game, I want to try to anticipate a large number of combinations for different pieces for each character. Originally, I had planned on having a frame-by frame animation for each piece for each animation, and then layer them to combine them into a character, but this seems like it would be a lot of work for my artist, and that the memory/disk size would start to add up as well since we would need a sprite for every frame, of every customization of every piece, in every animation, for every character.

What efficient ways are there to create/implement these animations as we add more and more configurations to our game?

Edit: I'll also point out that my artist is using flash to make the graphics and animations, but the game is in Java (libgdx, but I can also hard code OpenGL if I need to).

My game's characters are made up of different parts (head/body/legs/etc), and whatever items they have equipped. As I'm creating the animation system for my game, I want to try to anticipate a large number of combinations for different pieces for each character. Originally, I had planned on having a frame-by frame animation for each piece for each animation, and then layer them to combine them into a character, but this seems like it would be a lot of work for my artist, and that the memory/disk size would start to add up as well since we would need a sprite for every frame, of every customization of every piece, in every animation, for every character.

What efficient ways are there to create/implement these animations as we add more and more configurations to our game?

My game's characters are made up of different parts (head/body/legs/etc), and whatever items they have equipped. As I'm creating the animation system for my game, I want to try to anticipate a large number of combinations for different pieces for each character. Originally, I had planned on having a frame-by frame animation for each piece for each animation, and then layer them to combine them into a character, but this seems like it would be a lot of work for my artist, and that the memory/disk size would start to add up as well since we would need a sprite for every frame, of every customization of every piece, in every animation, for every character.

What efficient ways are there to create/implement these animations as we add more and more configurations to our game?

Edit: I'll also point out that my artist is using flash to make the graphics and animations, but the game is in Java.