Making raccoon in Blender: the knees

Studying Blender is a neverending process, and, as time passes, I understand its odds and ends better. So I did it again: redid the knees.

Previously I had the legs cut in 3 by 2 boxing objects and the object containing the front knee part:

The knee had a nice range of movements. But I had to add two objects on top and bottom of the knee, to avoid sharp edges (see the sharp edge below):

These had to be snapped to the front part of the knee, and there were some artifacts on the front edges that had to be smoothed out manually after remesh.
You see the top object highlighted, and it has a lots of vertices.

So I decided to redo this part and to create a containing object that could include those slopes as well.
Here it's inner structure, and there are much less vertices than in a single object above, not to mention there are two required:

And the opened knee looks like this:

Also the new knee cut shape is more narrow and looks nicer, to my opinion:


My goal is to not just random cut the joints, but to create a nice, smoothly looking joints.
Now I have to do something similar for the elbows, but there is an issue I'll describe later.

See the video: