Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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:

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