A method of point cloud geometry encoding includes receiving a slice of a point cloud frame for encoding, and constructing an octree representing a geometry of points in a bounding box of the slice where a current node of the octree is partitioned with a quadtree (QT) partition or a binary tree (BT) partition. The constructing includes determining a value of a partitionSkip variable specifying a partition type and a partition direction of the current node of the octree.