Systems and methods for animating a character model by deforming the character model based on poses. Embodiments may contain a modeling component in which a user may create a character model that contains a rig representing animation controls applied to the model, and geometric/graphic parameters for graphically rendering the model. The user also may create directed graphs that contain nodes representing operations that act on the character model and directional connections representing data flow between nodes. The embodiments may contain a compiling component that convert a directed graph into a sequence of instructions that perform the operations denoted at the nodes. The embodiments provide tools and methods to reduce redundancies in the sequence of instructions producing an optimized version of instruction sequence. The resulting instructions are then convertible into machine code for running on a video game device or loaded into a plug-in of a graphic rendering engine.