What It Does
Handy Hands 2 creates flexible 3D hand surfaces directly in After Effects. Each hand lives in a single shape layer, which keeps your timeline clean and lets you apply layer styles and effects without precomposing. The plugin uses expressions to calculate joint positions in 3D space and map them to 2D paths.
Key Features
Five preset hand styles. Switch between Simple Fill, Separated, Tapered, Stroke, and Advanced Stroke with one click. Each style changes how the hand renders, from basic fills to tapered strokes that give fingers natural width variation.
3-fingered mode. Some styles support switching from four fingers to three, which works for certain character designs or stylistic choices.
Management tools. The panel includes utility buttons: swap left/right hands, rotate 180 degrees, or add a linked hand. These speed up common adjustments when posing characters.
Compact panel design. Version 2 reorganized the interface with icon-based tabs and a detailed view that shows text descriptions for each feature.
Limited rotation axes. Hands support Y-axis and Z-axis rotation. X-axis rotation (pointing at the camera) isn’t available yet. For grabbing objects, duplicate the hand layer and hide the palm, keeping just the fingers to place above what’s being held.
Who It’s For
Character animators who need hand gestures without the overhead of multiple layers. Motion designers working on explainer videos or illustrated characters where clean timelines matter. The single-layer approach makes it compatible with standard layer effects, though advanced strokes and merge paths won’t work with Lottie exports unless you convert expressions to keyframes.
Pricing
$29.99 for a single-user license. If you bought Handy Hands 1 after February 22, 2023, the upgrade is free. Otherwise, it’s $15, which appears automatically when you log in with your qualifying account. Developed by Alfie Dawes. Full documentation covers all style options and control settings.