Smoothing awkward geometry

Question

I've created this thing, by boolean differences of icospheres from a cube:

I'd like to smooth/round the sharp edges it has, both the outer ones and the circular ones. I'm not sure how to go about it, honestly. It's a rather awkward geometry due to how it was made. So far I've tried:

• Selecting the edges I want to smooth and beveling them (total mess)
• The smoothing modifiers
• Remeshing, then the first two
• Subdiving, then the first two
• Cloning the object, fattening the clone with Alt+S, remeshing it to have much finer detail, then shrinkwrapping it back onto the original with a small offset

The last one is fairly close to working. The issue is that the object created looks a little wonky at the edges under smooth shading, which I haven't managed to fix either by tweaking the object afterwards or altering it before the shrinkwrap.

If there's no easy solution from this point, I'm open to making the object again in a different way. My last resort is just to make it in OpenSCAD. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You could create a cube, subdivide and smooth it in order to create a sphere, cut the holes all around, round them with the LoopTools > Circle:

Create a cube with the same subdivision, same thing, cut the holes and round them:

Give your cube a Cast modifier in order to round it, apply the modifier:

Join the 2 objects:

Bridge the holes with the LoopTools > Bridge option, bevel the edges: