{"id":634,"date":"2021-09-07T20:27:03","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T00:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joshuarosenstock.com\/teaching\/lightart-a21\/?p=634"},"modified":"2021-09-07T20:27:03","modified_gmt":"2021-09-08T00:27:03","slug":"slater-campbell-concept-proposal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joshuarosenstock.com\/teaching\/lightart-a21\/scampbell\/slater-campbell-concept-proposal\/","title":{"rendered":"Slater Campbell – Concept Proposal"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0 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. \"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

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.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n

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:<\/p>\r\n

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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.<\/p>\r\n

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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. \"\"<\/a><\/p>\r\n\r\n

Artist’s Questions<\/h2>\r\n