Recent advances in 3D spatial data capture, such as high resolution satellite images and laser scanning as well as corresponding data proc-essing and modeling technologies, have led to the generation of large amounts of datasets on terrains, buildings, roads and other features. The rapid trans-mission and visualization of 3D models has become a ‘bottleneck’ of internet-based applications. This paper proposes a robust algorithm to generate multi-resolution models for rapid visualization and network transmission of 3D models. Experiments were undertaken to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results demon-strate that the proposed algorithm achieves good performance in terms of running speed, accuracy, encoding of multi-resolution models, and network transmission.