You know, you have a really good analysis on this.



They changed a lot of the shaders and lighting when they rendered the new rig in Maya. My initial "Wait, what?" moment was with Ruby's nose and lips, because of the exaggerated shading. Yes, I suppose it does give depth and such, but it looked a little less like her. Also, I was a bit used to seeing the dot nose, and taking that away gave the same shock as if a parent stole a baby's nose... (Got your nose!)



Animation really improved. There were less object collisions (Like Ren glitching into the floor of the cafeteria from Yang's smackdown), and anything that made contact looked really spot on. The other thing I felt the short emphasized was Ruby's eyes. In the previous volumes, characters had eyes set inside the character's head (Which is totally fine. That's kinda how it's supposed to be.), but in this short, eyes appear to be part of the facial rig, which avoids polygon hits between the eyeball and the eyelid. With this improvement, the lines around the eyes are much more crisp, and even have a bit of depth to it (like, eyelashes actually stick out a bit).



One additional thing that may not have been noticed is fingers/fine movements. Animation has been getting better at this gradually throughout volumes since the beginning. Initially, fingers didn't move all that much. If anything, fingers were rigged with one bone (a unit of an animated "skeleton") so that the wrist joint had basically a glove at the end. It's gotten a lot better.



As for the materials, yeah. I'm a bit iffy on that, too. I think the reason why the cloak/cape felt thin was because they wanted it to act more... fluid. But with fluidity, it made it feel softer and less structured/stiff. Something they may use to fix it in the future, should they believe it to be an issue, is to increase material gravity, which while still fluid, would make it feel denser. It would still flow, but will avoid staying suspended in the air for so long, fluttering... but then again, that could have been an intended effect, too. Who knows?



And before v5, we still have to see v4. Intravolume adjustments may be made, right?