Often, the procedure involved with creating visuals can be modeled like a flow chart. Many visual editors use a flow-chart paradigm to give users a visual and script-less way to create procedural output.

In particular, shaders - programs that define colors and light reflections in a 3D rendering engine - are well suited to being turned from a visual flow-chart into performant code.

Outside of shaders and visual coding, dedicated tools like TouchDesigner allow for an incredible degree of flexibility and complexity when creating visual effects.

TouchDesigner is a professional tool used to run visuals for things like events, sports stadiums, art galleries, and more. See the work page of SudoMagic for a wide array of ways this tool can be used.

Visual Tools/Languages

• TouchDesigner
• PureData
• vvvv
• Blender Geometry Nodes
• Unity Visual Effect Graph
• MaxMSP (paid)

Shader Editors

• KodeLife Real-time GPU shader editor
• Shadertoy - Web Community & Tool
• GSNComposer - Visual Web Tool for Shaders
• SHADERed - Shader Writing Software

Visual shader editors also exist inside of 3D engines.

Unity has Amplify, Shader Weaver, and it’s officially supported Shader Graph. Unreal Engine has Material Editor, Godot has Visual Shaders, and Snapchat’s Lens Studio has a Material Editor.