No need for that kind of weird trickery, just swap the actor's mesh, for example like this in UE4: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/272247/change-mesh-1.html But to go more into the technical aspect, yes, they are scripted, using the same script language they used in their sprite-based games like Blazblue, so…
ok the flipbook 3d idea, got it. Works great. So my questions continues to be: HOW do they invoke those effects? By scaling them from a root node from 0 to 100? or opacity? or they are scripted, how?