FROM THE ARCHIVES
MAKE SOMETHING COOL
Learning how to learn.
For my personal projects, the goal is simple: make something cool. I love showing someone a finished piece, saying “I made this,” and seeing them wonder how it came together.
Youth Digital classes and YouTube helped me create these early projects. They were my foundation for learning on my own: understanding something new, trying it, and turning that knowledge into something I could make.
I apply new information as quickly as I can. Putting it to use is what makes it stick—and that’s a big part of why I love working with computers.
Inside the animation ↓THE CAMERA / BEFORE, DURING, AFTER
The frame I didn’t see coming.
NOTE TO MY YOUNGER SELF
Check your renders.
And check what’s enabled in the final one.
This render took more than 48 hours on my laptop. By the second day, I was watching it like a hawk.
I had checked my renders—but missed a mesh in the project outliner. It was hidden in the viewport and switched off during my checks, yet enabled for the final render. I never realized the camera would end up behind it.
After all that waiting, it was heartbreaking. It also taught me to understand my objects, materials, and outliner settings—and to pay close attention to what changes between the working project and the final render.
Stills from the original animation. The highlighted frame at 0:37.20 shows the obstructed view.
THE SAME EARLY CHAPTER / A SHOW IDEA
Life on Sphere’s island.
Sphere was going to be a 3D TV show, with comedy inspired by SpongeBob. The characters lived on Sphere’s island.
The bad guys weren’t very good at being bad guys. Somehow, though, they had a lot of money—and could do whatever they wanted.
An early world I wanted to turn into a show.
Ages 13–17 · PROFESSIONAL WORK
Vail Resorts
Ski instructor · Breckenridge, Colorado
THE NEXT PERSONAL ENDEAVOR / PHOTOREALISM IN 3D
From moving characters
to spaces that feel real.
A turn from animation toward design.
Architecture and interiors became the next thing I wanted to explore.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHALLENGE
Making it believable.
While I was in college, I started pursuing photorealism in 3D. This living room was the starting point—a shift toward designing spaces and making them feel convincing.
I worked with physics and cloth simulations, more deliberate UV and texture mapping, and a better understanding of seams and topology. The details mattered more as I tried to make a scene feel real.
- Physics & cloth
- Using simulations as part of building the scene.
- UVs & textures
- More deliberate mapping and seam placement.
- Topology
- Paying closer attention to how the geometry was built.
A DETAIL THAT FOUND ITS WAY IN
From a small scene
to part of a room.
This donut and coffee scene was another early exploration of photorealism. It also made its way into the living room render above—a small piece becoming part of a larger scene.
ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION / A COLLABORATION
From a building
to a whole world.
An architecture project became a complete scene: city streets, water, trees, and a place for the building to belong.
BUILDING OUT THE SCENE
Giving the architecture a setting.
Sydney Gelman shared her building model with me for one of her senior finals at Cal Poly. What began as an assembly animation grew into a full city scene, giving her architecture a setting among streets, trees, and water.
- Building architecture
- Sydney Gelman
- Environment & visualization
- Cord Wilson — surrounding city and landscape, materials, lighting, rendering, and animation.
THE BUILDING IN MOTION
Taking it apart.
Bringing it together.
I separated the model into parts, added color, and animated the assembly so you could watch the building come together.
FRISCO, COLORADO / ARCHITECTURE & ENVIRONMENT
The home was only
half the work.
A personal visualization study, working from plans shared by Matheson Construction.
FROM SHARED PLANS TO A PERSONAL EXPLORATION
Reimagining a home in Frisco.
Matheson Construction designed and built this home in Frisco, in Summit County, Colorado. They were happy to share the architectural plans and let me experiment. I modeled the home from scratch using those blueprints, then explored a reimagined look through materials, lighting, and landscape design.
The house was only part of that challenge. The grass and trees needed much more complex setups to make the whole scene feel convincing. I probably spent just as much time on them as I did on the home itself.
- Home design & construction
- Matheson Construction · Frisco, Colorado
- Reimagined visualization
- Cord Wilson · Modeling from architectural plans, materials, lighting, landscape setup, and rendering.
- Working with proxies
- Lightweight viewport stand-ins made the dense scene manageable while the detailed geometry was used for rendering.
- Project context
- An exploration of realism around real architecture, using architectural plans to model and reimagine the home.
01 / THE HOME MODEL
Starting with the home.
02 / THE SURROUNDINGS
Setting the scene.
AS MUCH WORK AS THE HOUSE
Making the landscape believable.
I spent time studying the grass on its own: the mix of short and tall growth, the uneven patches, and the way light catches the blades. Alongside the trees, those details became a major part of the architectural scene.
More complex node setups helped me work with that variation. These grass studies and views inside Blender show the work behind the finished landscape.
“I probably spent just as much time on the grass and the trees as I did on the actual home.”
CORD WILSON
INSIDE BLENDER / NODES & VIEWPORT PROXIES
A detailed render.
A workable viewport.
The full scene was too heavy for my computer to display comfortably in the viewport. I learned to design and use lightweight proxies—simplified stand-ins for the detailed vegetation—so I could keep working without displaying all of the final geometry at once.
Learning how to work with proxies became as much a part of the project as developing the look of the scene. The colored shapes in the Blender screenshot show those viewport stand-ins.
Ages 17–22 · PROFESSIONAL WORK
Dependable Automotive
FROM CONCEPT TO THE ROAD
A design put to work.
I created the mockups and concept designs for the shop’s electric vehicle wrap—the logo, its placement, the text, and the copy.
We then had the vehicle professionally wrapped. It’s now the shop’s main taxi, carrying the finished design into everyday use.
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AGES 22–25 / VISUALIZING WHAT COMES NEXT
Before Peak opened
its doors.
While I was working at KOAA, I was also helping imagine what Peak Pickleball could become.
From Burlington to Peak.
The former Burlington store was in the early stages of becoming Peak Pickleball. I created these renders to explore interior design, color, signage, and lighting while the facility was still under construction.
Getting a feel for the space.
Alongside the architectural plans, we used VR goggles at the facility to get a sense of scale and how the space would feel. The visualization helped us explore ideas beyond what we could see on paper.
Sharing the vision early.
We also used the renders with early investors to help communicate the vision for the facility—all before I officially transitioned from KOAA to Peak.
Signage in a different light.
Setting the scene on court.
A place to arrive and gather.
Concept renders by Cord Wilson, created during construction to explore the future facility.
Ages 22–25 · PROFESSIONAL WORK
KOAA Channel 5
BUILDING THE SYSTEM
From the ground up.
My coworker and I built this server rack from the ground up, with Greenfield’s guidance.
The rack was one of the cooler builds I worked on. The wiring was the ordeal: we ran roughly 50 cables up through the ceiling and across to the other side of the building.
Getting the lengths right, physically labeling both ends, and mapping every connection was crucial from the beginning. We needed to know which cable was which, where it needed to plug in, and why.
It was technical, painstaking work—and a lesson in how much planning sits behind a working system.
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THE OPEN CHAPTER
Still making things.
The ongoing work and what comes next.
Age 25–present · PROFESSIONAL WORK
Peak Pickleball
A logo I designed.A tipped-over P for pickleball, with mountain peaks for Peak. The P also suggests a pickleball being slammed.
01 / 09