Simulating lighting is one of the most important parts of rendering 3D scenes. While lighting coming directly from a light source is easy to simulate in real-time, indirect illumination is more difficult. One of the methods used to convincingly approximate indirect illumination is ambient occlusion, where the brightness of objects is reduced when there is geometry nearby, most visible in corners and crevices.

To render ambient occlusion in real-time often requires shortcuts that leave out some important lighting cues when geometry is not directly visible on screen. Our method aims to improve this specifically for character animation by pre-calculating the occlusion and storing it in a compact data format using cubemaps. This method has the potential to improve both visual quality and rendering performance.

Team Sunweb, a professional cycling team and our client, is constantly looking for innovations to help them win races. They tasked us with creating an application which could assist coaches with determining the strategy during a race. This application, which we dubbed TelaSol, is supposed to run on a tablet that is mounted on the dashboard inside the coach car. For this project we developed an application that allows races to be prepared on a desktop computer and tracked during a race on a tablet-optimized interactive dashboard. On this dashboard, there will be information on the riders, the route and comments that can be added before the race.

During development we have considered existing solutions, relevant literature and useful technologies to get an idea of what was possible and how we could achieve our goal. We used this knowledge to create our initial set of requirements. We then proceeded development of application using an agile approach, which involves regular feedback moments from our client to update the requirements and adjust our focus accordingly. To verify the quality of our product we relied on a combination of automated tests, user testing and validation through the client.

Initially the application was supposed to integrate live data coming from the riders during the race, but due to a regulation change we had to change our focus. Instead, we focused primarily on creating the application for playback purposes, while still keeping it adaptable to live data. The application performs the main tasks that were initially defined properly. After further development on live data and extensive situational testing, the app can be used to its full potential. Using TelaSol, Team Sunweb will improve their ability to analyze races and increase their chances of winning.