Abstract: In this paper, we present an adaptive-coding method for generic triangular meshes including both regular and irregular meshes. Though it is also based on iterative octree decomposition of the object space for the original mesh, as some prior arts, it has novelties in the following two aspects. First, it mathematically models the occupancy codes containing only a single-"1" bit for accurate initialization of the arithmetic coder at each octree level. Second, it adaptively prioritizes the bits in an occupancy code using a local surface smoothness measure that is based on triangle areas and therefore mitigates the effect of non-uniform vertex sampling over the surface. As a result, the proposed 3D mesh coder yields outstanding coding performance for both regular and irregular meshes and especially for the latter, as demonstrated by the experiments.