Abstract: We present a generic framework for compression of densely sampled three-dimensional (3D) surfaces in order to satisfy the increasing demand for storing large amounts of 3D content. We decompose a given surface into patches that are parameterized as elevation maps over planar domains and resampled on regular grids. The resulting shaped images are encoded using a state-of-the-art wavelet image coder. We show that our method is not only applicable to mesh- and point-based geometry, but also outperforms current surface encoders for both primitives.