Originally published on my Patreon. Since then, Weaver tells me Aperture has been downloaded over 1500 times and has been added to Linden Lab's official Third Party Viewer Directory
What you're watching above is the birth of a new Second Life viewer -- but in a real sense, it's also the culmination of the creator's lifelong fascination with light in all its varieties. The video starts at a baseline, which is what every viewer (default, Firestorm, etc.) displays, then shows off 18 presets in this new way of seeing and screen-capturing Second Life.
It’s called Aperture Viewer (links below), and it's lead developed by William Weaver. Over a decade ago, Weaver became renowned within the Second Life art community for his exquisite images and astoundingly moving machinima like this one from 2012.
He largely left SL for many years, however, after a dearth of graphical updates -- "When the visuals feel static in a platform that’s really been about visuals for me," he explains now, "the fun just fades" -- but returned in 2024, curious to see how the release of physically based rendering last year had changed the world.After logging back on, he installed a PBR reflection probe.
"My jaw hit the floor," as he puts it now.
“Light was bouncing—something we’d never had in‑world. It felt like a whole new engine hiding in plain sight. I still think many people have no idea what this thing really does now.”
But after weeks of tests, he realized the existing SL viewers hadn’t fully adopted to this new PBR era:
“Phototools had been basically untouched for a decade and couldn’t expose half of PBR’s magic. We needed more tools, things that SL didn't have, to start complementing what it can now do."
Rather than explain what he’d learned in a tutorial, he went several steps beyond -- or rather, several thousand:
Above: Raw, untouched Aperture screen capture by Surrealia Hexem -- more on her Primfeed
“I decided to rebuild the tooling myself. One update snowballed into 150+ settings audits, a rewritten feature table, and finally a forked viewer (and not in that order)!”
So Aperture was born, Weaver’s attempt to create a Second Life viewer that shows off all the graphics features now possible in the virtual world -- even to SLers who don’t have a high-end PC:
“Ultra graphics [viewer settings] didn’t even enable all the modern effects, which didn't sit right with me,” he explains. “I wanted everyone—even mid/lower-tier hardware users included—to toggle shadows, DOF, SSAO, SSR, mirrors, you name it, without tanking FPS. That meant a ground‑up rethink of FeatureTable (SL's graphics presetting system).”
The result is a viewer that reflects his broader view of the virtual world:
“Second Life, at its core, in my opinion, is an image experience. If the camera window vanished, we’d just be in a really super fancy chat room. So we treat visual fidelity as the top‑line feature, making it a core priority in our development.”
Above: Raw, untouched Aperture screen capture by Maldriel Resident -- more on her Primfeed
Which brings us back to William Weaver, an avatar named after the English translator of Italo Calvino, Italy’s legendary author of fantastic stories. In real life, the avatar’s owner has traveled the real world, photographing new encounters with light when he can -- visual insights which help explain why he's now effectively rebuilding Second Life from scratch.
Finding New Forms of Light: Both Real and Digital
Here are some of William Weaver's snaps from his global travels:
“I’ve always been fascinated by light,” he tells me. “That started in childhood, when I spent entire afternoons chasing the way sunbeams bounced around my first hand‑me‑down film camera, and it’s followed me ever since. Most of my real‑world photos are grabbed on the fly while traveling, usually on my phone, whenever an unexpected play of color, geometry, or atmosphere jumps out."
“Whenever I travel I’m acutely aware how unique each experience is—I may never stand in that place again, meet those people again, feel that exact air on my skin. Everything is new, a little strange, wildly exciting. Taking the picture is my way of pinning that fleeting scene to memory, of bottling the spark so it doesn’t fade.
“It’s the moment itself that changes me—the photo merely marks the boundary between who I was a heartbeat earlier and who I’ve become after seeing it. A tiny before‑and‑after frame for the soul. Think Marco Polo wandering through Calvino’s Invisible Cities, gathering impressions before they dissolve.
“Aperture Viewer grew out of that same lifelong obsession—translating the magic of light and framing into a virtual space where the creative possibilities are practically boundless.”
Those photos shared, he shares another image with me, all digital but as resonant to him as the ones he took during his globe-spanning jaunts:
“This shot was the very first image I grabbed after I’d dialed in the viewer’s post‑effects," William Weaver tells me. "Like my travel pics, it felt like a true inflection point—I knew there was no going back. If we can get visuals like this live, raw, right in‑world, we’re on new ground.
"And if you believe, as I do, that light, color, and shape carry meaning, emotion, thought—even the quiet echoes of both joy and sorrow—then we suddenly have so much more space for our souls to speak to each other. I’m excited to see where we all head next and what we might discover there.”
And now that you’ve seen some of the imagery which inspires William Weaver, here’s more on this new aperture into the virtual world that he’s created:
Aperture Viewer: Resources, Download Link, Community
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"Our Discord community is thriving, and we'll be sharing much more there, including livestreams, tutorials, and guides. Next releases will push both performance (under‑the‑hood render logic) and headline‑grabbing features we think will surprise folks—then upstream anything Linden Lab can use."
More about Aperture features (technical and social):
Putting Photoshop inside the viewer: Aperture Phototools Suite (APS) brings Adobe Camera Raw‑style sliders + saveable presets right into real‑time. Edit like VSCO, click once, shoot, done. This had been the vision since 2012, finally realized.
WindLight 2.0 kickoff: We started by rewriting the starfield (20‑year‑old code!) and have a roadmap to modernize sky & atmosphere now that PBR gives us room to play.
Openness & security: 100 % open‑source, rigorous security, clear docs—often exceeding TPV requirements.
Rapid hot‑fix cadence: Launch bugs do sneak through; we’re in hot‑fix mode now with an update coming very soon.
Community‑first feedback loop: If someone shares an idea or bug, we respond and (when feasible) implement quickly. That real‑time input is shaping our roadmap.
Education & resources: We’re expanding the GitHub wiki with deep‑dive tech docs on SL’s rendering system—ideal for users who love the nitty‑gritty.
Work is under way on our next major release, with full Mac & Linux support high on the list.
We’re eager to collaborate with the wider TPV community to keep pushing SL forward.
Untouched Aperture SL screencap by jenna_ohhh
Finally, thoughts from William on where Aperture fits within the broader TPV community:
"We recognize there are many paths and many excellent viewers out there, and not everyone will see Aperture as their preferred tool, or agree with all our choices—and that's perfectly fine. There's a vibrant ecosystem of TPVs and the official viewer, offering plenty of options. The key for us is the drive to innovate and to genuinely try to bring new possibilities into the hands of the community, because we believe in the potential of the platform...
"One more important point, at least from my perspective: I owe a huge thanks to Linden Lab for making Second Life open source. It's an incredible gift. The cynic in me realizes most corporations would never do this; they did, and they deserve credit for it. And honestly, getting my hands dirty in the codebase, even just a bit, has really shown me the sheer scale and complexity of what they're managing with SL. It gives you a different level of respect for the whole endeavor."
Much thanks to Whiskey Monday (herself an acclaimed SL photographer) for first setting me on William Weaver's trail.
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Thank you so much for this wonderful piece on this truly amazing viewer! We hope to see much more from the Second Life community through the lens of the Aperture Viewer. :)
Posted by: maladriel | Wednesday, May 28, 2025 at 03:09 PM