Lmao, glad to hear it seems to ease development. Now, don't replace that with hardship in some other area of development. Real talk, does it seem like development will be easier for next gen?
Well, I'm not a games developer myself, but I do a lot of 3D work, focusing on architectural visualization. There's plenty of overlap by principle, and by my knowledge a ton of hassle will be eliminated by UE5. In the most direct sense, it just removes downtime during development or, due to a lack of technical requirement, expedites the process. The latter, for example, means no more creating UV lightmaps for models. You can imagine unwrapping a plain cube into it's 6 sides - this is necessary so the engine (UE4 here) can properly bake shadows onto the cube. If you didn't do that, you'd just have a uniform increase in light-/darkness of the model after baking the light, without any defined shadows as such - happens because the engine would bake 1 pixel of shadow into the topright corner, which gets applied to the entire model.
Now imagine you need to do that for highly complicated and detailed objects, and many to boot. It doesn't eliminate UV-Unwrapping entirely, because texture artists still need that to properly paint textures onto objects without creating a huge mess. But that's the end of it, you needn't create a second UV map just for lighting. In my case, I can forego a lot of that now, since architectural objects often don't feature terribly complex textures.
Or level of detail for models, also gone now. The engine automatically scales as required, so I can just plunk in studio-quality assets without a second thought. This is a big deal, given performance constraints up until now.
Expediting results from full Global Illumination. No longer do you need to render out the lighting if you make sweeping changes to a scene. It's fully dynamic, at rendertime. No more downtime! Instant feedback at all times.
Development will find other ways to demand time, but from a technical perspective, a lot of frustration gets alleviated. This will be immensely liberating, if, IF the engine can deliver on all it promises. Fingers crossed!
