Fine cutouts with a wide bevel

Question

I'm trying to model the following plate in blender:

I tried bending a plane to form the general shape of the plate, and then adding solidify, boolean cutouts and then bevel them.

At this point, whatever I do goes sideways really fast - the bevels overshoot or don't appear at all, the cutouts don't end up round, etc.

Here is an example of a simple attempt - I start off with a plane and a cutout (I have to bevel the cutter so that I have the round corners properly:

I then add solidify and bevel:

The bevel doesn't show, because clamp overlap is on... When I turn it off it either messes up the geometry, and the widest I can get it and still have it look reasonable is this:

Adding subdivision before the boolean and/or bevel doesn't help much either:

Can someone direct me, or help me understand what I'm doing wrong? Is my entire approach to the process wrong? Am I using the modifiers in a wrong way?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

An approach without Booleans is to model this plate from a subdivided plane and then add some modifiers. Lay the mesh over the reference image and remove the square faces where the holes should be:

Then either extrude (E, S) and scale a support loop:

-or- fill (F), inset (I) and remove the face. Later creates an edge with even width. On the outer edges of the plate you need to use Extrude:

For comparison, the left/bottom area has extruded/inset extra support loops, the right/top area has none and is a bit jagged:

The round holes can be created with the Mesh:LoopTools add-on that ships with Blender (screenshot 1). The edges can be smoothed with the Relax operation of the LoopTools.