Drew Nelson

Turn 10 Studios

• Develop and maintain Fuel, the primary editor used to build Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon content, delivering new features, workflow improvements, and long-term tooling support for art and design teams.

• ​Led a major overhaul of Shotcaller, the in-editor screenshot and replay capture system.​

  • Expanded functionality beyond media use to support automated multi-car capture workflows for the Cars team.​

  • Collaborated with art, media, and vehicle teams to improve robustness, scalability, and adoption across disciplines.

• Designed and built the Material Retargeting Tool (MRT), a critical system for shipping Forza Motorsport (2023).

  • Enabled conversion of Gen8 vehicle materials to Gen9 through a reusable XML-based ruleset system.​

  • Reduced per-car conversion time from weeks to hours, with batching support for large-scale processing.

  • Coordinated with Playground Games to extend MRT for Forza Horizon 6 content needs.

• Architected V-Ray Direct, a new lightmap baking pipeline that bypassed 3DS Max by integrating directly with the V-Ray SDK.​

  • Reduced ambient occlusion bake times from 12 hours to ~1 hour per track.​

  • Partnered with lighting and pipeline teams to build a headless baking system integrated into nightly build jobs.

• Co-developed STARS (Satellite to Automated Road Splines), collaborating with AI, design, and track teams to prototype a workflow that generated road splines from satellite imagery directly inside Fuel.​

• Serve as technical lead for ForzaTech Tools:​​

  • Define technical roadmaps, breakdown features, and coordinate with content, production, and engineering teams.​

  • Build foundational systems before delegating work, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and code quality.

  • Mentor engineers and uphold engineering standards across the tools codebase.