This article describes a new method for converting an arbitrary topology mesh into one having subdivision connectivity. First, a base mesh is produced by applying a sequence of edge collapse operations to the original mesh with irregular connectivity. Then, the base mesh is iteratively subdivided. Each subdivided mesh is optimized to reduce its distance from the original mesh and to improve its global smoothness and compactness. A set of corresponding point pairs, which is required to compute the distance from the original mesh to the subdivided mesh, is determined by combining the initial parameterization and the multi-resolution projection. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields good performance in terms of global smoothness, small distortion, and good compactness, compared with conventional methods.