Abstract. The paper describes the effect of the local surface modelling methods known as plane, quadric and triangulation on the generation of the 3D mesh models of the historical objects with rock-based building structures using Cloudcompare, an open-source software for point cloud data processing. The methodology begins with data collection of the 3D test objects using terrestrial laser scanning technology, the pre-processing of the point cloud data, the point cloud subsampling process, the process of generating of the local surface modelling data, the process of generating the 3D mesh models and finally, the analysis, which involves the 3D surface deviation analysis between the generated 3D mesh models. The overall results shows that there are no significant differences between the 3D mesh models that was generated from all the three local surface modelling methods. The histogram analysis shows that the plane and the quadric local surface modelling methods is the best methods to be used in the research where the 3D test object to be modelled contains curvy surfaces without sharp edges and corners.