I want to talk about the Graph Editor — specifically how underutilized it is by animators who came up through blocking-first workflows. For a long time I treated it as a cleanup tool, something you visited after the poses were solid. That turned out to be a pretty limiting mindset.
The shift for me came when I started working in Blender alongside colleagues who had Maya backgrounds. They were shaping curves as they were blocking, not after. Watching them manipulate the velocity of a movement directly — flattening a curve to create a hold, pushing a tangent to juice an ease-in — made me realize I had been doing an extra round of polish that was really just correcting poor curve decisions I had baked in earlier.
A few habits that changed how I work:
First — default to flat tangents on every new key. Auto-tangents in Blender and Maya are convenient but they introduce overshoot you didn't ask for. Starting flat and building the curve intentionally forces you to make a decision about every transition.
Second, check your curves before you check your viewport. If the curve looks wrong, a bump where there should be a smooth arc or a sharp spike on a rotation channel, the viewport is going to confirm it. Fixing the data is faster than tweaking poses until the visual problem disappears.
Third, separate your channels when things get complex. Stacked curves on a single graph panel hide problems. Isolating the Y translation of a hip bone will immediately show you whether your weight shift is actually reading the way you think it is.
I've heard Cascadeur pushes some of this further with its physics-assist tools, though I haven't had time to dig into it seriously. Would be curious whether it changes how people think about curve work or just abstracts it away entirely.
What are your Graph Editor habits — things you do consistently that you'd consider non-negotiable at this point?