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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 1390275" data-attributes="member: 4720">It's a pain to adjudicate, however.  Massive differences in opinion come up on what does and does not put off heat, how much "residual" heat is left behind for things like tracking, etc.  Do undead put off heat?  And so on.Also, for the record, there is no actual analogue to infravision in nature.  Heat-detection in animals is not done through the eyes.  If you "saw" heat, your visual world would be incredibly complicated and full of noise.  Heat-sensing is through an entirely different sense.  If I had to go out on a limb, I would say it was most like hearing, but it's tough to say that for certain since we don't have it. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Creatures that sense heat tend to use it in conjunction with scent, or to compensate for the fact that their motion detection is good, but visual detail is poor.  i.e. they know something in front of them is moving, but they can't tell if it's food or a stray leaf.  Their heat detection, however, shows a heat source, so it's probably food.  That kind of thing.  Also, heat detection wouldn't help you navigate in your environment at all, unless every object in the environment, including the walls and floor were giving off notably different amounts of heat.Ultraviolet light is used in vision in some species (mainly insects, iirc), but what they do is alter color perception, for the most part.  The simple version of this is, they can see more colors than we can.</blockquote>

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