Quadtree and pyramid structures have attracted considerable attention in recent years. They are increasingly being applied to the fields of digital image and signal processing. As a result, the efficient embedding of these structures in VLSI arrays has become an important research topic. In this paper, we propose three schemes to embed either quadtrees or pyramids in a rectangular, hexagonal, or octagonal mesh, respectively, with three different node shapes for VLSI layout. Our analyses show that the best achievable node utilization is 67% when embedding either structure in an octagonal mesh. This result outperforms the best utilization recorded in literature by 25%. Our study also indicates that the octagonal node gives the best balance between area utilization and routing space requirements between the processing nodes.