How the HUD face works in Alice: Toys of Madness

I wanted to have a HUD face in Alice: Toys of Madness. But I needed multi-frame animations for blinking, pain reaction, etc., in contrast to Doom. It's pretty difficult in UI context... So Alice's face is actually handled by an actor.
The video shows how it'd look if rendered in-world.

How it works: a monster-like actor is spawned and attached to the player (but isn't actually rendered in the world). It uses actor states to display animation sequences when the player is hurt, idle, etc. The HUD reads the actor's current sprite and draws it in the UI every frame.

Granted, this is kind of a hack, but it was a lot easier to utilize an already existing animation system used by actors than try and create something from scratch specifically for UI. Trust me, I did that first, it didn't work nearly as well ;)