Just recovering from a bout of gastric flu, so I almost missed the P5 preview [too much information?].

The new render engine is now being described by Steve Cooper as similar to a Reyes type renderer, ie. a scan line renderer similar to that used in the Pixar films, not a renderman compliant ray-tracing engine which was orginally mentioned in February.

As you may have noticed from the Toy Story films, it is possible for scan line renderers to generate reflection approximations (good enough for shiny floors), although not as naturally as Ray Tracers can handle it. Mention of reflections was I noticed absent from Kupa's feature descriptions.

In Bug's Life, a few scenes used ray tracing to create glass effects (caustics and refraction). The implication being that the Reyes algorithm isn't well suited to these effects.

My guess is that refraction and caustics won't appear and full reflections are looking unlikely (but if they give me a strong enough Python interface this time you never know).

BTW it looked to me as if all the renders generated to demonstrate collision detection and hair features were still using the P4 scan line render engine (possibly enhanced to handle the hair procedurals). I also noticed that the surround light effects were still being generated by multiple spotlights.