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Many sophisticated solutions have been proposed to reduce the geometric complexity of 3D meshes. A less studied problem is how to preserve on a simplified mesh the detail (e.g. color, high frequency shape detail, scalar fields, etc.) which is encoded in the original mesh. We present a general approach for preserving detail on simpli-fied meshes which is completely independent on the simplification technique adopted to reduce mesh size. The detail (or high frequency information) lost after simplification is encoded through texture or bump maps. The original contribution is that preservation is performed after simplification, by building set of triangular texture patches that are then packed in a single texture map. Each simplified mesh face is sampled to build the associ-ated triangular texture patch; different methods for storing this set of texture patches into a standard rectangular texture are presented and discussed. The solution is very general, because it can be applied to the output of any simplification code and because it allows preservation of any attribute value defined on the high resolution mesh. Moreover, the produced mesh de-couples shape from detail (the latter is encoded with texture maps) and allows highly efficient rendering. We also describe an alternative application: the conversion of 3D models with 3D procedural textures (which generally force the use of a software renderers) into standard 3D models with 2D bitmap textures, which con-versely can be rendered on any standard HW/SWgraphics subsystem. EMAIL:: [email protected]