With the ever-increasing development of digital technologies and digital 3D models, the question of 3D mesh protection has becoming more and more important. One of the problems in digital watermarking is to decide how to embed in a 3D mesh as many bits of information as possible while ensuring that the hidden information can be correctly retrieved after 3D mesh compression. This paper describes a hybrid watermarking/compression system, adapted to semi-regular 3D meshes. The central contribution is to integrate blind watermarking, to geometric progressive compression algorithm. The latter consists on semi-regular wavelet transform and zerotree coding approach. The proposed embedding method operates in the discrete wavelet transform domain using dither modulation principal. This work shows the ability of joint watermarking/compression scheme to guarantee watermark robustness against compression attacks while inducing a low quality degradation.