During progressive transmission of 3D geometry models, the transmission order of details at different region has great effects on the quality of reconstructed models at low bit-rate. This work presents a ratedistortion (R-D) optimized progressive geometry compression scheme to improve the quality of reconstructed models by adjusting the transmission order of details. In this scheme, the input mesh is partitioned into parts, then each part is encoded into bit-stream independently, and the encoded bit-streams are truncated into segments while getting the R-D characteristics of every segment, at last all segments are assembled into a codestream based on R-D optimization, which ensure the region with rich detail will be transmitted early and make the reconstructed mesh achieve better quality as soon as possible. Experimental results show that, as compared with the well-known PGC method, the proposed one provides better R-D performance. Moreover, it provides a novel way to realize the region of interest (ROI) coding of 3D meshes.