Two algorithms are presented for simplifying triangle meshes. Given a mesh that is more refined than is necessary for a given application, we can reduce the triangle count while maintaining visual quality. The first algorithm is edge decimation using a quadric error metric. This is a simple method which assigns an error measure to each possible edge elimination, and the mesh is incrementally simplified one edge at a time. The second algorithm is variation shape segmentation, which is a two step process. First the mesh is partitioned into regions/clusters. After the error measure of these clusters is minimized, we create a new mesh, where each cluster is represented by a simple mesh. This method can drastically reduce the size of the mesh. The two methods can also be combined by first performing a moderate amount of edge decimation followed by clustering and re-meshing.