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I think one image can say more than thousands of words.

Click on the black point to check the middle point for alignment.

Another thing is about the anchor points and his slaves.
I like to use flash for fun, and, everyone who use flash make it all the time, you make the body, you attach a slave and make the slave as a symbol, so, it make easy to chance the showing sprite in this slave, but, the most powerful triumphs of Flash is the chance you have to make this sword in the symbol using many sprites, one for each time key, and select each sword according with some switch, so, in the gadget, you rotate the symbol, stratch, compact, etc, without the need to make this changes on the sprites inside the symbol.

To clarify what I'm saying you need to think in one sample.

So, I did my animation with all the body parts, now I want to attach a sword on his body, but I'll need to make all the rotations, size mods, etc, on the sword, with the exactly duration of my body parts, right?

What about I just make the sword anchored on this body and in the screen where it's showing I do the mods without the need to modify my sword animations?

So, I'll can make much more, thing in a multi part body, there the legs are attached on the body, I can change the body sprites and the legs, I make animations for each type of legs and body, meet the two and with variables I change his sources, so, where they are meeting (a 3rd animation) I do some little alignments in each frame, etc, working modular.

umm, another image maybe can illustrate it better.

Oh, for the legs another way (more simple) is to do one main animations calling the standby and walking animations, and make them statics, so, when it call the static movement, the movement animation is animated, so, will show the animation.

I have to agree. I believe what he is saying is that he would like the ability to play 'pin the tail on the donkey' with his sprites. Basically you have a Body, Head, Arms, Legs, Weapons etc. Each of these being an independent piece. You can then select say the body, and set an 'anchor point' from which it attaches to the body. Then you can make animations by moving these peices etc.

So you could overlay images in order to create a full sprite.. piece by piece.
Best way I can explain it is like this..

You have a torso, you attach an bicep to that, you attach a forearm to that, you attach a hand to that, you set a sword to the hand. You can then set the first frame of a 'animation' to rotate (from the anchor point) the bicep over 5 frames to a new position which is 50 degrees different than it started. It of course, auto adjust all the child 'anchors' at their current rotation to the parent. Not to say that you cannot set more than one to animate at the same time though. They would need to have the ability to set one piece in front or behind of the other so as to provide the ability to make them semi 3d etc. I think this would be a great feature.

A good example of this being used in a game would be vandal hearts..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...;list=PLB9774DFE5FC11A43 at about 6:11. While these sprites are well blended together, you can easily tell that their weapons are super imposed onto the bodies at a certain anchor point. This anchor point being the front of a bow for archers, and the handle of a sword for the others.

It basically gives you alot more room to animate things with less actual spriting.
I hope this helps!

I agree with the above, but I can explain a little bit more to make it well understandably.

The animator would be better than the actual just adding some new stuffs.

The first one is about a alignment system, where you can automatic align your sprites just clicking on one of the 9 alignment buttons, they are Left Upper, Upper, Right Upper, Middle Left, Middle, Middle Right, Left Down, Down, Right Down, so, after you select one of them, your sprite will be aligned by that point, starting all the rotate, recize, offset and any other actions by that point of reference, and that point of reference will the the reference for this sprite when you make it anchored in another sprite, like a arm, you clicked on the Left Upper to align it and give it a reference point, now you do a little bit of offset to perfect match the aligning reference point the exactly point where is the should of this arm.

Anchoring this arm in a torso, I placed the anchor point where have the area to the shoulder on the torso, and the torso to shot the arm, right? so, that point will shot the arm, and the shoulder will be perfectly placed where it need to be, so, if I would like to make some animations on the arm, I can do it just editing the arm, if I want to rotate this arm individual, I can, just rotating it inside the arm animation, but if I would like to rotate it without making any change in the arm animation, I can do it using the torso animation, just rotating and changing the setup of that anchor point, so I can use this same arm to make the front arm and the back arm without needing to redraw it or make another animation.

Cleaning up my explanation, What I said is, I can do animations inside one animation, I can do animations on anchored points, that don't affect inside the anchored animation, but affect outside, like resizing the anchored item, rotating, offsetting it, etc, but the anchored animation still that, intact, the only one affected it the anchor point represented by that animation.

So, following this line, you can do a full body, and in a simple way you can do a multi-part gadget without needing to design all the sprites for each situation, because you can build it inside the software.

Look it, like that attached image on the first post, I did a body, I did a animation for the legs, I attached the legs on the body and aligned it to make the reference point Upper, so, I shotted the legs on the body and make the anchor point immediately down his torso, in the middle of his body, so, the legs are animated for two situations, the first is standing, the second is walking, the legs animation will follow this conditions to happen, but the body can have more situations, so, this two animations are independent of each other, happening different things for each one in every situations. Oh, I would rotate the legs a little bit when walking, but I don't want make it using the legs animations, because the legs will be used in another body for another player, who don't rotate his legs, so, in the first body I shotted the legs in the anchor point and rotated the anchor point a little bit with the animations happening, like a rotation costing 3 seconds. It don't need to be necessarily legs, think about arms, shield, weapons, spells, a boss with huge and independent legs, like a giant spider, or a Dinosaur, where you can shot his giant parts and just rotate his anchors points, resizing it and making everything necessary to make various sizes and different aspects of the same Dinosaur, using the exactly same base animations, just resizing, etc, etc, his anchor points. Oh, and the main body? You can easily workaround it with a torso animation shotted in the middle =P

It become nice when you can see what you're doing, I did a system like this for a game in GM, but you can't think how the hell it give me pain, because I don't know to programming, but I can say for you, I know what We, users, need to have a perfectly tool, it I really know.

I do it for RPGs, doing players in modular sprites, enemies too, trees, destructible objects, etc.

With it, I can also do a system to change his pants easy, just overlying the player body with the right pants.

We actually added a new feature called "Attachments" where you can attach events together. I think it has the exact same effect as you describe in your original post just done in a different method. Once we release the beta again, check it out and let me know what you think.

Also, you can certainly make a video, thanks. Some of our beta testers make youtube videos for us that helps us understand them better.