I have a model that was created in matlab that is a cosine fourier series in two dimensions where the amplitude and phase are random such that the surface is similar to a rough surface (like sandpaper). The surface is 8 in. X 8 in. (213.2 mm X 213.2 mm) with roughness elements that are 2 mm in amplitude with 2 mm wavelength. In other words, in order to adequately capture all features, the stl file that is outputted from matlab is 2,000,000 facets. I have been trying to figure out if there is a way to import this file into solidworks and convert it to a surface so that I can edit it and turn it into a plate with the surface on top of it. The plate will then be printed and placed in a wind tunnel so that it can be tested. Anyway, the native solidworks stl importer fails in this case because of the size. I have seen that there is a work around for this by first converting the stl to dxf with meshlab and then importing but I also believe that the size is too great to use this as well as my computer would keep crashing (others agree in ) The next thing I tried was Scanto3D where I outputted the x,y,z coordinates in matlab and imported them as a pointcloud into solidworks. Using the surface wizard there is two options, a guided creation and an automatic creation. The automatic creation crashes every time. I even tried with 32 GB of memory but I had no luck. The status bar at the bottom does not move. I tried the guided creation with B-Spline surface extraction but the surface extraction only allows between 4-20 lines in each direction, far below what I need. Does anyone know how I may be able to turn this mesh into a surface in solidworks? The problem will become even worse when I go to create the other two surfaces with roughness amplitudes of 1 mm and 0.5 mm where I can expect the number of facets to quadruple in each case to 8 million and 32 million. Any help would be greatly appreciated. The file is too large to upload but I have attached some images.

Best,

Eric