Abstract: A large number of vertices and triangles in 3D relief models may result in much memory cost when 3D printing them. To handle this problem, we present a novel and efficient approach for 3D relief meshes, which is achieved by representing the input 3D fine relief mesh as a coarse mesh with a bump map and applying the slicing computation on the coarse mesh instead of the fine mesh. The algorithm consists of three steps. First, the coarse mesh is refined by an adaptive mid-point subdivision with the depth derived from the bump map. Second, we compute and store the slicing using the refined mesh and then release the memory storage of this mesh. Finally, the slicing is used for generating the printing path in 3D printing. Experimental results have shown that the proposed method has greatly improved the efficiency of computing and reduced the memory storage in 3D printing relief models.