An integrated development environment includes a visual shader designer engine that enables a user to create a pixel shader embodied as a directed acyclic graph. The directed acyclic graph contains nodes, where each node is associated with an operation that is used to generate a color characteristic of a final rendered model. The visual shader designer engine displays a rendered image at each node that is the result of the node's operation during development of the directed acyclic graph. An error texture is rendered in a node when an erroneous condition is detected in rendering a node's operations.
