Typically, relief generation from an input 3D scene is limited to either bas-relief or high-relief modeling. This paper presents a novel unified scheme for synthesizing reliefs guided by the geometric texture richness of 3D scenes; it can generate both bas- and high-reliefs. The type of relief and compression coefficient can be specified according to the user’s artistic needs. We use an energy minimization function to obtain the surface reliefs, which contains a geometry preservation term and an edge constraint term. An edge relief measure determined by geometric texture richness and edge $z$-depth is utilized to achieve a balance between these two terms. During relief generation, the geometry preservation term keeps local surface detail in the original scenes, while the edge constraint term maintains regions of the original models with rich geometric texture. Elsewhere, in high-reliefs, the edge constraint term also preserves depth discontinuities in the higher parts of the original scenes. The energy function can be discretized to obtain a sparse linear system. The reliefs are obtained by solving it by an iterative process. Finally, we apply non-linear compression to the relief to meet the user’s artistic needs. Experimental results show the method’s effectiveness for generating both bas- and high-reliefs for complex 3D scenes in a unified manner.