A robust watermarking algorithm is proposed for 3D mesh models. Watermark is inserted into the 2D image which is extracted from the target 3D model. Each Pixel value of the extracted 2D image represents a distance from the predefined reference points to the face of the given 3D model. This extracted image is defined as “range image” in this paper. Watermark is embedded into the range image. Then, watermarked 3D mesh is obtained by modifying vertices using the watermarked range Image. In extraction procedure, the original model is needed. After registration between the original and the watermarked models, two range images are extracted from each 3D model. From these images. embedded watermark is extracted. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is robust against the attacks such as rotation, translation, uniform scaling, mesh simplification, AWGN and quantization of vertex coordinates.