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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]