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i think the easiest way to explain this: You know how some software is more geared towards arch viz, and some towards mograph, and some towards character animations. They each put a different emphasis on various things and tools. Arch viz software probably won't bother too much with developing hair tools, just enough for grass and carpets. Mograph software isn't that concerned with character animation, just enough for a guy pointing/holding a product, maybe some 10 second animations.. Character animation software doesn't really care that much about cloning objects or interactive text objects. But all these things are still pretty close to each other and overlap. Since they all focus on offline rendering. So the interactivity takes priority during creation. Unreal is a game engine, the end product ABSOLUTELY must be interactive that is the highest priority. So they sacrifice interactivity during production. And the tools they develop are largely geared towards creating games, not movies/animations. They are objeviously moving towards making movies, and are being used on projects, but at least with unreal 4, you still feel at every moment who this tool was created for. It's kinda like using a sledge hammer to hammer in nails. It works, and if you line up a whole bunch of nails, you might be able to nail them all in at the same time, but it's still very awkward :)) Or boiling a 10 liter pot of water instead of using an electric kettle. It does boil a lot of water at once, but then it's kinda awkward to pour it into small cups, and it doesn't shut off automatically etc.. it's just lots of small little things which add up during your usage experience.

Alright I've played around with the new lighting and rendering engine "Lumen" for a bit now. It's... really freaking impressive stuff. Here's some examples. Mind you, NOTHING in this is hardware raytraced. All software. Theoretically runs on anything, even if it doesn't support RTX. It seems like they're using Signed Distance Field for pretty much everything. So what you get is basically: Real area shadows (depending on your light source shape), realtimge GI, realtime reflections and one of the most impressive things: realtime emissive meshlighting! Depending on the mesh size it's very noisy but again, this is realtime and it's early access. Let's see what comes in the future. One warning though if you want to try it out: it is VERY VERY crash happy, at least on my machine. I've played with it for about 2h now and I had at least one crash every 10-15minutes, oftentimes, depending on what I was doing, much more frequent. Still, very cool tech! Realtime Area Shadows SVyuV9UQJd.mp4 Realtime... Lighting? 8Clw4IW0Y0.mp4 More Realtime Lighting! No traditional lighs in the scene! 92btR6k4z9.mp4 Realtime Emissive Materials / Meshlights. No traditional lighs in the scene! IRBYvQwKDp.mp4

I am refusing to buy either of those in an effort to keep plodding away improving my own system. Will have another update out in the next few days as well.