Abstract: An irregular connectivity mesh representative of a surface having an arbitrary topology is processed to generate a parameterization which maps points in a coarse base domain to points in the mesh. An illustrative embodiment uses a multi-level mesh simplification process in conjunction with conformal mapping to efficiently construct a parameterization of a mesh comprising a large number of triangles over a base domain comprising a smaller number of triangles. The parameterization in this embodiment corresponds to the inverse of function mapping each point in the original mesh to one of the triangles of the base domain, such that the original mesh can be reconstructed from the base domain and the parameterization. The mapping function is generated as a combination of a number of sub-functions, each of which relates data points in a mesh of one level in a simplification hierarchy to data points in a mesh of the next coarser level of the simplification hierarchy.