For my Light Art project, I’m planning to make a “ship in a bottle” made from 17 layers of laser engraved and cut acrylic. Each layer will feature a cross section of the ship HMS Surprise, from Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. Each layer of acrylic will be edge lit from beneath by addressable RGB LEDs. The outer edge of the acrylic will be cut in the shape of a bottle, except for the middle layer which will extend upwards and feature the masts and rigging. The full length of the bottle will be just under 20 inches. 
In front of the bottle I will have smaller pieces of acrylic cut in the shape of waves, with more wave detail engraved on them. By stacking multiple layers for waves and changing which parts are lit up, I intend to make the waves animate. The cross sections of the ship will hopefully make a volumetric effect when stacked up. The outer layers will primarily show the outer hull of the ship, but the inner layers will show the internal decks, cannons, doors, ladders, barrels and other furniture. I plan to design a wooden base with a rotary encoder used for multiple purposes: one will be to light up a single layer at a time. By turning the knob, the viewer will be able to “scroll” through the layers and see detailed cross sections of the ship.
Above is a draft of the middle cross section of the Surprise. I need to do many modifications by hand, to clean up unnecessary lines and add ones that should be there (such as the mizzenmast which has mysteriously disappeared). In order to generate these cross sections, I first looked online for technical drawings of the ship. The most useful ones I could find still didn’t serve my purpose very well:
Generating cross sections with the right hull shape from such images was going to be very difficult. After experimenting with different methods, I decided to purchase a 3D model of the ship and generate my cross sections from there. Credit to Axeonalias (https://sketchfab.com/Axeonalias) for the ship model. From here, I setup a keyframed animation in Blender to move a rectangular prism in 15 steps. A boolean modifier subtracts any geometry outside of the rectangular prism. I then use a Blender plugin called Freestyle to export an SVG of each layer. The image below shows the middle slice in Blender.
The first 7 slices need to be viewed from a camera on the back, and the next 8 from a camera on the front. I need to tweak the width of some slices to make them look better. Below is what all 15 layers look like currently. 
Artist’s Questions
- I’m trying to figure out what to make the base look like. I think I want the waves to surround the bottle, almost like it’s floating in them, and I don’t want the base to be too intrusive on that element. I’m open to ideas!
- I’m thinking of having the middle slice of the ship be much taller than the bottle, to accommodate the rigging. Do you think that will interrupt the shape of the bottle too much?
- Currently my main idea for interactivity is the scrolling through active panes thing. Can you think of ways I can make it more interactive?
- Thoughts on the cohesiveness of the concept in general?
This is a great idea, and I appreciate that you’ve already prepared the layers you expect to engrave to give us an idea of what they look like. I’d be intrigued to see how they all look together – I imagine 17 layers of linework might blur together a little when viewing all of them at once, but that could be a positive effect!
I think a base of blue acrylic waves is the way to go – or, if you’re feeling ambitious, a nice-looking cigar box/block of wood. In either case, it’d be cool to be able to remove the slices easily so you can look at each one more carefully.
I personally think having the rigging extend beyond the bounds of the bottle may look a bit odd – have you experimented with making the bottle itself larger in “diameter”?
In terms of interactivity, a slider along the front of the stand that lets you highlight layers individually would be a cool feature to have. If you already intend to have a control board in this, you could have the lights all be on together in an “idle” state, then turn on one at a time when the slider is being moved.
I really like the idea of a slider! I think that would be much more appropriate than a knob. My original thought was that when you turn the knob (or move the slider) the lights will switch to the mode that highlights a single layer. If the slider isn’t moved for 5 seconds, it will automatically return to the idle mode.
As for making the bottle larger, I originally thought about that. The problem is that I would either have to scale the ship down by a lot, or use drastically more acrylic. With the current dimensions, I need at least 7 sheets of 18×24 acrylic and I can’t mess up any of them. Making it bigger would be too expensive! One thought I had to preserve the bottle aesthetic is to cut out the areas between the masts and rigging. That would remove a lot of the glow, but it might help with the cohesiveness of the bottle.
This is a really cool idea. In regards to the interactiveness, maybe you could add a button that turns on the outer panels of the ship, or allows you to view every layer turned on at once? You mentioned using addressable RGB LEDs for each cross section. Do you imaging the color changing to create the illusion of water reflecting off a surface?
My thought for the water was to have a glittering effect where the LEDs go through some shades of blue and occasionally flash white. Additionally, I’ll have waves in a few positions that can be lit alternately.
Nice that you have all the layers already! It’s interesting that the mast sticks out, I wonder if it will destroy the illusion of a bottle. Try it and see I guess!
I’m also wondering how you will make sure that only the specific cross section (and no other) will be lit up.
I hope the cross-sections of the ship will be in color. This would be a lot of work but it would be really cool if you could see all the people in the ship in the cross sections, the captain, the hands, the cooks, the blacksmith, people at the weapons, and as you scroll through you see a story unfold, like maybe a comic strip?!
That would be a lot of work but so awesome!
Adding to Casey’s point: you could even have a mirror or real water to simulate a reflection, but this is probably low-priority
I like the idea of having people in the cross sections! If I have time I’ll definitely try and add that. As for lighting only one cross section at a time, I will use a filter which is laser cut from some thin opaque material at the bottom. It will work the same way as in my edge lit clock, since the LEDs are wider than the acrylic panels. All the LEDs are addressable, so to light just one panel, I will write a program to light only the LEDs under that panel.
Also, on alternative interactivity, you could have mood lighting on the ship and/or have the colors on the waves change based on a lot of stuff. It would be funny if the ship ‘fires’ whenever a person comes near somehow.
I love the ship idea! I like your idea about making the base look like waves, i think that’d be a great touch, another idea would to make the base look wooden, like a ship in a bottle on a mantel.
I really love this idea of creating a 3D image and model using 2D slices of acrylic and using addressable LEDs to light up different regions of the ship. In terms of an idea for the bottom of the piece to hold the bottle, I like the idea of doing something with waves to make it look like its out on the water, and think you could somehow create a 3D model of waves and print a few pieces out and spray paint them to let them sit on the water. You could also add LEDs or fiber optic cables into the 3D print to make it look like the water is maybe crashing lighting up in certain areas.
I definitely like the idea of the sails going outside of the bottle it could be cool if maybe you switched mediums outside of the bottle. Maybe you could transfer to more of a cloth like medium for the rigging outside of the ship.
I think the moving waves sound super cool, and it would be really cool if you could make it look like the ship was rocking, but I’m sure that would be really difficult.
I think having the middle slice of the piece be just a large rectangle will look really strange, and you should look for an alternative way of showing it. One thing I will suggest is to just have the bottle shape on the middle slice and then only have the mast pieces be cut out instead of engraved, that way the edge-lit acrylic will still show the details but it won’t just look like a chunky piece for the center slice. (I hope this makes sense, and if not feel free to reach out and ask for clarification if this sounds interesting to you)
Cutting out the mast pieces instead of engraving them is a great idea! I’d been thinking about it more and at the very least, I’ll probably cut out the empty space between the masts and rigging to preserve the bottle aesthetic.
This is amazing! Like something you would see at a museum, and you are using blueprints of a real ship. I love that you are planning to create the feature to just light up one layer at a time. Will the wave animation still work while using this feature? I think that the middle slice, if it was a whole big slice, could take away from your vision. If you had just the parts of the ship sticking out, if that is possible, I’d think that might be better.
Thanks!! And I haven’t decided whether to have the wave animation while viewing one layer, I’ll probably try both out. As for the middle slice, I think I’ll need to experiment, but I have a few ideas for how to make it work.
This is a really cool idea, glad I could help with some of the Blender set up. If you wanted an even better idea of what it would look like put together, once you have the exported svgs, you could convert them into pngs and import them back into Blender onto a bunch of planes with the right spacing.
I think the animated waves will be a really nice touch to add a bit of motion into the model.
I think I like the masts and rigging being outside of the bottle, it looks distinct compared to other ships in bottles, and also draws attention to the hull area, which is the only part that really benefits from multiple layers.
One suggestion is that in addition to having the slider scroll through individual layers, you could have it show only layers past that point (so you could have like half visible).
I also really like Tarang’s idea with the ship being able to fire the cannons, but I’m not sure how you could get that to work.
I absolutely love this concept! I could see the middle section disrupting the shape of the bottle. Especially if, like Matt mentioned, the middle layers start to get blurry. It might look a bit strange but I don’t have experience working with acrylic.
As for the base, the “water” is usually inside the bottle and a wooden base (often with a little plaque) holds up the entire bottle. So, when you say base, are you referring to the bottom of the bottle or what will hold the bottle? It could be really cool to have the traditional wooden base be replaced with lit up acrylic waves. Having these as a separate piece from the bottle acrylic where it looks like the bottle (instead of the ship) is floating on the waves could help it be less intrusive.
This is a creative idea that looks to be a fun challenge to make. I love the “stepping through” the layers aspect.
In my view, having a single layer with the outline of the upper rigging protruding above the bottle could provide a striking upper focal point. It does change the usual visual relationship of bottle to ship, so I think you will have to just try it and see if it is cool or weird.
I’m definitely in favor of some light effects that animate the waves at the base. You are likely going to need a box to put some electronics into, so that might as well be the base. I think it would be most fitting if the box was made of wood and weathered to look like ye olde packinge crate.