Aspects of the disclosure provide a lossless compression method for 3D mesh models. The method can be combined or layered with other compression methods to provide additional data compression capability. The method for compressing a mesh model having geometry information and connectivity information of vertices can include defining a first set of vertices having a same connectivity property, determining a subset of the first set of vertices that are encompassed by an area defined by the first set of vertices, and encoding the mesh model without the connectivity information for the subset of the first set of vertices.