Changing the HUD Background

[Wavelength]

Summary: I need to change the Battle HUD Background during the game.  How do I do this?

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Full detail:

There are certain elements of my Battle HUD that I learned would be best to implement as part of the HUD's background - for example, the "empty" part of MP gauges for characters that use MP, and the "slash" right before Max HP/MP/TP (since the two numbers are displayed on separate parts of the HUD instead of side-by-side).

However, for the first time, I'm now running into a problem with this approach.  While I normally have two characters in battle (and designed the Battle HUD around this), there are a couple of battles where the party will be only a single member.  For most of the HUD elements this is fine, but since the background was designed as a static element, it looks very weird with only one party member:

The background, as displayed in the editor:



The battle system in action, with two characters (looks good):



The battle system in action, with only one character (looks strange):


I looked through the Add-Ons and didn't see anything that would be useful - the only one that caught my eye was "Change Windowskin in Battle" but it has no instructions and I assume it's only for default RPG Maker Windows rather than gradient/picture backgrounds.

So I need some way to change the Battle HUD Background and I'm hoping this can be done.  If there's some way to do this, please let me know how!!  I don't need to change it during battle; a solution that allowed me to put in a script command before and after the battle to change the HUD's background for the upcoming battle would be perfectly fine.

Alternative approaches?:

If it's easier to change the starting x coordinate of the background to about -250 during the game, then change it back to 0 later (instead of changing the background's picture), that would probably also be an acceptable solution for this project.

If I need to create multiple HUDs with the only difference between them being the background, I don't mind doing this.  Again, some direction as to how would be appreciated!

If there is a smarter way to implement the elements in question instead of implementing them as part of the background, I'm all ears.

Thank you so much for any help you can offer! <3

 

[MirageV]

Instead of an HUD background, make the base HUD a character face and blank out the main HUD. That way, you can meet each character's different HUD needs. This also means that the HUDs will move to account for party size without trouble as well, since they're really just faces.

Like so:

 

[Wavelength]

Instead of an HUD background, make the base HUD a character face and blank out the main HUD. That way, you can meet each character's different HUD needs. This also means that the HUDs will move to account for party size without trouble as well, since they're really just faces.

Like so:

This is brilliant!!  Thank you, MirageV

This "HUD as face" solution will certainly work for my current needs and has some nice upsides like being flexible to any number of potential party members.  If anyone has a more general solution to the problem, I'm sure that would help a lot of people.