Lee Daniels Shares Two Quick Methods for Creating Seamless Joints for Arms and Legs in After Effects.

Rigging 2D characters come down to two methods. One involves segmenting limbs into different layers and parenting them into a hierarchy, and the other consists in deforming a whole shape. If you are using the “every section on a layer” method, the challenge becomes how to have outlines and solid fill work together to create seamless joints without destroying the premise that an arm is all one coherent shape.

Lee Daniels offers two quick way to do this in After Effects in his latest Quick Tip tutorial. Daniels shows a super-easy way by simply using masks to cover and reveal in the elbow or knee areas. The other is a bit more involved and makes use of Ae’s Simple Choker effect to shrink away the line on the top-most layer. Now when creating 2d characters, you can easily make arms and legs and have seamless joints without too much hassle.