ABSTRACT Realistic simulation of pedestrian movement in natural environments remains challenging due to the limited interaction between agents and dynamically changing terrain. In real‐world settings, pedestrian trails emerge through repeated footstep interaction with deformable terrain such as snow, grass, or soil, and these trails subsequently influence navigation behavior and crowd flow. However, existing crowd simulation approaches typically treat terrain as static or rely on predefined paths, limiting both visual realism and behavior consistency. We present an environment‐aware crowd navigation model that integrates footstep‐driven trail formation, directional trail encoding, and trail‐aware pathfinding to produce emergent, visually grounded pedestrian behavior. Our approach models terrain as a deformable surface represented by a dynamic height and trail‐intensity field updated at each footstep. As agents traverse the environment, footsteps increment local trail intensity and modify terrain appearance, producing persistent visual trails. These trails are simultaneously encoded into a 2D grid used for navigation. Pathfinding costs are dynamically adjusted using accumulated foot traffic, encouraging agents to follow existing trails while still allowing divergence when beneficial. Results show improved visual plausibility, natural trail reuse, and coherent crowd flow compared to static‐terrain baselines.
Noor et al. (Fri,) studied this question.