A method of compressing meshes using a projection-based approach, and leveraging the tools and syntax already generated for projection-based point cloud compression is described herein. Similar to the V-PCC approach, the mesh is segmented into surface patches, only the difference is that the segments follow the connectivity of the mesh. Each surface patch (or 3D patch) is then projected to a 2D patch, whereby in the case of the mesh, the triangle surface sampling is similar to a common rasterization approach used in computer graphics. For each patch, the position of the projected vertices is kept in a list, along with the connectivity of those vertices. The sampled surface now resembles a point cloud, and is coded with the same approach used for point cloud compression. Additionally, the list of vertices and connectivity is encoded per patch, and this data is sent along with the coded point cloud data.