The Universal Face Controller: Solving 3D Character Rigging & Facial Animation in Real-Time

The Problem

3D animators face a persistent workflow bottleneck: achieving believable facial animation and lip-syncing without burning endless production hours.

Animating a face natively in Blender remains complex and time-consuming. Heavy industry pipelines like Autodesk Maya and SideFX Houdini require extensive rigging setups to get professional results. Meanwhile, round-tripping custom FBX models into dedicated tools like Reallusion iClone for lip-syncing presents severe compatibility barriers, as those systems restrict deep facial animation capabilities to their own proprietary character rigs.

At The Stephanie Michaels Software Company, we targeted this exact pipeline breakdown and built a native solution directly inside the engine.

The Solution: COUNTENANCE

Built directly into the Univah Film Engine, COUNTENANCE is a native, real-time feature designed to streamline facial animation across any character rig.

Instead of relying on third-party plugins or proprietary asset locks, COUNTENANCE exposes all required parameters to animate any 3D face directly inside the viewport in real time.

What This Delivers:

• Universal Rig Compatibility: Animate custom 3D characters without relying on locked proprietary character bases.
• Real-Time Control: Fine-tune facial performance and lip-syncing with zero rendering wait times or heavy caching routines.
• Streamlined Pipeline: Eliminates multi-software FBX exports, round-trips, and plugin dependencies.

See It in Action & Test Univah

We invite investors, studio leads, and digital artists to evaluate the Universal Face Controller firsthand.