How to bevel something like this?

[vida_vida]

I have a socket joint I use in 3d printing.
It’s made by booleaning a uvsphere to a box, then booleaning another shape to the result to allow the ball joint to rotate up to 180 degrees.

The problem is, I now need to bevel this edge as it is too sharp and acts like a sandpaper/knife for my 3d printed ball joint.

But I’m unable to bevel these edges, as the topology is messy and I have many tiny faces there.

What can I do?
I can’t really use sculpting here as I need it to look like it was made by a machine and not by hand.

[etn249]

Maybe it would be possible with the “bevel after boolean” addon:

[WIP]Bevel after Boolean

I apologize for the automatic translation. Hello everybody. I recently started writing a small script that allows you to do Bevel after the Booleans. I just started learning Python and Blender api. Therefore, my implementation is very primitive and contains errors. My code may look very bad and contain many errors. But I’ll try to fix it in the future. To use, Tools Panel>Boolean Bevel. Description of functions: Show wire - Displays and hides the wire Change Boolean Operation - Allows you …

There are multiple versions of the addon on this page.
However, It doesn’t seem to work in the current version of Blender, so you might need to use an older version.

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If that’s not an option, I have a method that will give you the look you want, but the topology will be even messier. Also, I don’t know if it’s precise enough for your case.

1-Use voxel remesh on the object. Go as fine as is reasonnable. If you used the remesh modifier, apply it
2-Use the “smooth” modifier and increase the “repeat” setting until the corners are rounded as you need. Apply the modifier.
3-Use the decimate modifier so the object has a polygon count that can be worked with. Reduce until you start seeing a visual difference, then go back a bit to give the mesh some margin.
4-If the outer corners need to stay sharp, you can extrude the outer faces before the procedure and then boolean them back to perfect flatness at the end.

[Modron]

Maybe try to work the bevel into your initial boolean operation, or do an additional boolean to get the bevel?

[LordoftheFleas]

The last few days I have been playing around with the Blender 3.3 alpha and attempting to build a geometry node setup that creates procedural bevels for just such situations:

The modifiers shown in the picture internally create a boolean difference and, using this new node here

rebuild the mesh around the intersecting edge with a bevel.

I will probably create a topic later this week (or on the weekend) where I explain in detail what this setup does (and believe me, it involves a lot of bad hacks).

Also, it is quite buggy, so do not expect this to become an add-on anytime soon

I used base meshes with a lot of geometry for this and moved the edge loops of the cylinder around until the result was clean(ish).

autobooleanbevel_demo_blender_3.3_v01.blend (836.0 KB)

[Okidoki]

You also might to think about a slighty different construction method for a one time bevel:

By shrinkwrapping a “bridge” over the ball joint and copying some geometry and reconnect…