Raleda Sun

While I can't say for sure (because all the items with the property that I own are "no edit"), Im pretty sure there isn't two prims here, and it's definately not a texture rotation. I could wrong I suppose. In effect, I'm trying to make a character with blinking eyes and facial expressions, which both currently exist on the live server. What leads me to believe it's deformation is the slight texture stretch at time of animation and the fact that I can click on the things behind said animating object without selecting any invisible prims.

I've been out of the game for a few years. Now that I'm back, I'm looking to start sculpting again. I've seen a lot of things like avatar heads where only a portion of the actual prim itself seems to move, rather then work on the "texture rotation" scripting I had grown familiar with? I'm tempted to say this is a physics deformation, based on what I've seen of physics, but I can't say for sure. How is this sort of thing done? With mesh just around the corner, being able to directly influence the sculpts is important!