The graph editor becomes cumbersome to use when there are a lot of curves visible, such as when a large character set is selected. Often, lots of keys and curves have no effect on what you're working on, but they still affect the graph editor:
- They cause the graph editor to be crushed vertically in stacked mode, making every curve tiny. If you have 500 keys selected, the stacked views are nearly unusable. Even if you only have one or two attributes visible, it's a lot easier to work with the graph editor when there aren't several unanimated keys (eg. when keying just .tx, and .ty and .tz have just a single starting key).
- Curves that have very different values at different parts of a scene cause the whole curve to be squished in normalized views.
It would help if there was a way to only display curves and keys that have an effect on the current time slider period:
- Hide keys that have no influence on the time range. The previous key before the time range and the next key after it should still be displayed, since they do affect it. Hiding these keys will improve the normalized views, by allowing curves to be normalized across just the visible part of the curve.
- If a curve has no keys in the time range, and its value is constant across the time range, hide the curve entirely. This will remove a lot of clutter from static keys, and from keys that are used in some parts of a scene and not in others.
There are other details, like when to update the view (you wouldn't want keys and curves disappearing as you're editing them), but that's the general idea.
