Can a guy reorient the rotation tool to be perfectly horizontal and vertical with the graph when I've always managed to while modeling by freezing transformations?
>>528897
In my experience, a golden rule as an animator is don't fuck with the rig (i.e. freezing transforms on the rig). So I don't think I'd recommend doing that.
The best thing you could do for pose study is work in stepped mode and pose your model in one frame, key all the controls, move a frame forward, zero out all your controls, then work on the next pose you wish to create.