The recent decade has seen the emergence of 3D meshes in industrial, medical and entertainment applications. Therefore, their intellectual property protection problem has attracted more and more attention in both the research and industrial realms. This paper gives a synthetic review of 3D mesh watermarking techniques, which are deemed to be a potential effective solution to the above problem. We begin with a discussion on the particular difficulties encountered in applying watermarking on 3D meshes. Then some typical algorithms are presented and analyzed, classifying them in two categories: spatial and spectral. Considering the important impact of the different attacks on the design of 3D mesh watermarking algorithms, we provide an attack-centric viewpoint of this state of the art. Finally, some special issues and possible future working directions are discussed.