How to increase bevel width without totally destroying mesh

Question

I have a mesh I created from turning a picture into a g-pencil into a curve into a mesh which I thickened with solidify. The issue is that I want to smooth the corners but certain points of the mesh are extremely close together so my bevel is either extremely small, or just completely destroyed.

This is the maximum size of a decent bevel I can get

This is what I get when I increase the bevel width

This picture below is where I would like the edges to go when I increase the bevel width. Isn't there any way that I can get the edges to spread apart in a non-destructive way? I've played around with all of the options in the bevel options box, but nothing even came close.

I was thinking that getting this preferred bevel shouldn't be too hard, but now I'm thinking that it may not even be possible

Here is the mesh, I added a second mesh alongside the original that has been subdivided with 3 iterations. The quality of the mesh is lowering very fast meanwhile the bevel width is barely increasing.

Answer 1

First thing I would do is do a planar decimate. Bevel modifier always works better with minimal geometry. You might need to also do a bit of manual cleanup.

The reason this isn't working is because the bevel mod looks at the verts/edges you want to bevel and uses both edges on either side to inform which direction it will send the new geo. Right now you only have one of the two edges it needs to sort this out.

So after decimating and applying that I would select the front face and inset it just a little bit.

You'll probably need to go through and collapse some of the interior corners. Just select all of those verts and press Alt+C to collapse them .

After that the bevel works pretty well.