A method, medium, and apparatus for encoding and decoding three-dimensional (3D) data. The method of encoding includes converting 3D data having at least of any one of PointTexture, voxel, and octree data into adaptive octree data where intermediate nodes are given labels, encoding nodes of the adaptive octree, and generating a bitstream from the encoded data. The method of decoding includes reading nodes making up a tree from a bitstream of the 3D data, decoding the read nodes, recovering an adaptive octree from the decoded nodes, and recovering at least any one of octree, voxel, and PointTexture data from the adaptive octree. It is possible to efficiently encode a huge amount of 3D data, and to recover the high-definition 3D data with a small amount of data since it is possible to efficiently encode the volume data with a certain resolution as well as a fixed resolution.