Character deformation when moving bones?

How do I make a character’s mesh move to accommodate other limbs when posing, like the thighs moving for the calves, etc. Anyone know? I don’t want to use shape keys, as sculpting and editing geometry is too tedious.

Its called constraints. When a bone moves you can tell another to move with it.

You can also have a look at corrective shapekeys but you said you dont want to use it…

Here he is using drivers for the bones:

Otherwise this channel is great:
https://www.youtube.com/c/LevelPixelLevel/videos

And another thing is just to look up constraints for bones.