Abstract: Aiming at the limitations of conventional CAD model-based sampling strategies of general surfaces （continuous or discontinuous surfaces of basic features） for coordinate measuring machines （CMM ）,an adaptive sampling method is proposed,and the detailed sampling algorithms for measuring edges and faces are presented．After analyzing the selected surface characteristics,step's adaptive subdivision and iteration are adopted to plan the sampling points'locations for the specified point number．The points are distributed evenly according to the surface shape,and located apart from the discontinuous areas．The experimental results show that the method has strong adaptability for general surfaces with different complexity,and tackles the shortages of random sampling strategy and number sequence-based sampling strategy．