Methods, apparatus and streams are disclosed for encoding, transmitting and decoding volumetric video. Volumetric video is encoding in the form of a patch atlas sequence. The patch atlas is generated, and a sub-set of patches is selected to be partitioned, for instance on a size criterion. Metadata are associated with the atlas in a data stream to indicate which and according to which partitioning mode patches are encoded. At the rendering side, a level of sampling level is selected according to memory and processing resources of the end-device. Only parts of partitioned patches are decoded as a function of the selected sampling level.