Hey guys, first of all, congrats on the release, and thanks for taking the time to answer our questions! Could you introduce yourselves to the community?

Thanks for reaching out to us! I’m Arthur Shek, the Technical Art Director at Turn 10. I’m responsible for leading our team to optimize content authoring workflows and take advantage of new tech. I have some folks from our art team with me, so I’ll let them introduce themselves.

Hi, my name is Tyler Finney. I’m the Lead Concept Artist for Turn 10. Our Concept team is not only responsible for pre-production concept and visual direction throughout production, but also high-concept asset creation in special cases, such as our driver suits.

Hello, my name is Toren Lehrmann and I’m a 3D Artist at Turn 10, specializing in shaders and materials. I was responsible for creating, editing, and managing the shader library for cars, tracks, and drivers on the project. Shaders are the backbone for a material in our proprietary ForzaTech engine, and they contain the instructions, textures, and parameters which determine the look for assets in the game.

If we include the Forza Horizon Franchise, Forza Motorsport 7 is the 10th game developed or co-developed by Turn 10, with an average score of 88% on Metacritic (some developers would kill for this)! How do you organize and motivate yourselves to constantly improve your franchise?

As a first-party studio at Microsoft, one of Turn 10’s goals is to showcase Microsoft hardware and software, namely Xbox and Windows Gaming. We certainly feel that challenge and that motivates a desire to be best in class. Our studio has a great blend of automotive fanatics, combined with a strong passion for cutting-edge graphics and gameplay. Hiring the right mix of people has always been key to our success.

Let’s talk about Art Direction: despite being visually stunning, and hyper-realistic, the Forza Motorsport franchise has its own unique "touch". How would you describe this, and what kind of techniques do you use to reinforce this visual identity?

During production on Forza 7, we adopted a term that we used to summarize our visual initiatives - “Beautiful Racing”. We organized a strike team around this topic to determine what visual features we wanted to drive to support our core gameplay and new design features, such as dynamic weather and the intense thrill of racing. That team had a lot of discussions – A LOT of discussions. We created a bunch of prototypes, new production techniques, and visuals that also fed back into the design. Our biggest challenge was taking an abstract term like “Beautiful Racing” and turning that into a list of specific work to do, but somewhere in that magic mix, we hit on something that worked. We’ve been incredibly pleased to see reviews calling out our beautiful racing because it means our work paid off when it comes back to us in the words that we started out with.