Inspired by the successful application of image secret sharing schemes in multimedia protection, we present in this paper two secret sharing approaches for 3D models using Blakely and Thien & Lin schemes. We show that encoding 3D models using lossless data compression algorithms prior to secret sharing helps reduce share sizes and remove redundancies and patterns that possibly ease cryptanalysis. The proposed approaches provide a higher tolerance against data corruption/loss than existing 3D protection mechanisms, such as encryption. Experimental results are provided to demonstrate the secrecy and safety of the proposed schemes. The feasibility of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated on various 3D models.