Systems and methods are described for performing spatial and temporal compression of deformable mesh based representations of 3D character motion allowing the visualization of high-resolution 3D character animations in real time. In a number of embodiments, the deformable mesh based representation of the 3D character motion is used to automatically generate an interconnected graph based representation of the same 3D character motion. The interconnected graph based representation can include an interconnected graph that is used to drive mesh clusters during the rendering of a 3D character animation. The interconnected graph based representation provides spatial compression of the deformable mesh based representation, and further compression can be achieved by applying temporal compression processes to the time-varying behavior of the mesh clusters. Even greater compression can be achieved by eliminating redundant data from the file format containing the interconnected graph based representation of the 3D character motion that would otherwise be repeatedly provided to a game engine during rendering, and by applying loss-less data compression to the data of the file itself.