Catalog thumbnail weirdness

[Iridium]

might be relevant to the small problem I'm having.

Some of my chairs (both dining and living) and sofas have oddly translucent thumbnails. It's not a great problem but I would like some insight into what's going on.

I combined three screencaps into the attached image to show what I mean.



At the time I took these screencaps, I had already pulled out my Downloads folder, checked {each EP I have}/TSData/Res/Catalog/Bins to make sure there were no other files except globalcatbin.bundle.package, and deleted the five thumbnail cache files in Documents/EA Games/The Sims 2/Thumbnails. I don't download lots and my SavedSims folder is empty.

The actual chairs and sofas are always correctly textured when I place them.

What's causing this, is it a VBT, and how can I fix it whether VBT or not?

[J. M. Pescado]

Maybe you need to increase your view distance, because the thumbnails are taken from sufficiently far away that the chairs are disappearing into the fog?

[Iridium]

@TashaFawn: Thanks! That took care of it. I was under the impression that if one deleted the thumbnail files, then that was redundant, but I tried it anyway.

@Pescado: fiddling with the fade and view distances made no difference

For any other Mac users who find this thread, I'd like to point out that pressing command+control while clicking with a single-button mouse will have the same result as control+rightclicking.

[Treble]

Maybe you need to increase your view distance, because the thumbnails are taken from sufficiently far away that the chairs are disappearing into the fog?

Does in-game view distance really influence how object thumbnails are created?  I have made objects before that showed up tiny on the thumbnail in-game, like the preview pic had been taken from two streets away even though the camera in Blender was close to the object.  Could that be because my view distance is always set to extra far or whatever the biggest one is?

[Lord Darcy]

I have made objects before that showed up tiny on the thumbnail in-game, like the preview pic had been taken from two streets away even though the camera in Blender was close to the object. 

Check out this tutorial by aikea-guinea.