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Animating gaze behavior is crucial for creating believable virtual characters, providing insights into their perception and interaction with the environment. In this paper, we present an efficient yet natural‐looking gaze animation model applicable to real‐time walking characters exploring natural environments. We address the challenge of dynamic gaze adaptation by combining findings from neuroscience with a data‐driven saliency model. Specifically, our model determines gaze focus by considering the character's locomotion, environment stimuli, and terrain conditions. Our model is compatible with both automatic navigation through pre‐defined character trajectories and user‐guided interactive locomotion, and can be configured according to the desired degree of visual exploration of the environment. Our perceptual evaluation shows that our solution significantly improves the state‐of‐the‐art saliency‐based gaze animation with respect to the character's apparent awareness of the environment, the naturalness of the motion, and the elements to which it pays attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explosive volcanic eruptions rank among the most terrifying natural phenomena, and are thus frequently depicted in films, games, and other media, usually with a bespoke once‐off solution. In this paper, we introduce the first general‐purpose model for bi‐directional interaction between the atmosphere and a volcano plume. In line with recent interactive volcano models, we approximate the plume dynamics with Lagrangian disks and spheres and the atmosphere with sparse layers of 2D Eulerian grids, enabling us to focus on the transfer of physical quantities such as temperature, ash, moisture, and wind velocity between these sub‐models. We subsequently generate volumetric animations by noise‐based procedural upsampling keyed to aspects of advection, convection, moisture, and ash content to generate a fully‐realized volcanic skyscape. Our model captures most of the visually salient features emerging from volcano‐sky interaction, such as windswept plumes, enmeshed cap, bell and skirt clouds, shockwave effects, ash rain, and sheathes of lightning visible in the dark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]