Yesterday I generated a thumbnail for the ideal plantsim displaying the ideal plantsim's in-game appearance. However, the texture for the hidden Shocked / Fried hairstyle the ideal plantsim uses doesn't display correctly in the ideal plantsim's in-game thumbnail. These two images show the difference between how the hair appears in the ideal plantsim's default headshot vs. the headshot I generated of the ideal plantsim's in-game appearance:

The clothes also aren't displaying properly on the first one, so I'm guessing it's just an older thumbnail (possibly with lower render settings) that never got updated.

If you find a way to update it ingame, it should fix itself (with AL, most thumbnails for playables update constantly to the point of annoyance, though not sure about the more obscure NPCs)

The ideal plantsim on the right is just an exact replica that I downloaded from ModtheSims. I didn't want to mess with the default version. Since messing with the default version can cause game corruption. But the replica is definitely identical. Since the person who extracted the face of the ideal plantsim did so by extracting the facial structure information from the default. Though how they were able to do this, I'm not sure. Since the facial features of universal NPCs can't be extracted the way the facial features of regular Sims can.

Have you considered briefly installing a default (single) replacement for the plantsim, wait for the thumbnail to change, then remove the default? Could possibly help with changing the thumbnail.

What do you mean by that? The default ideal plantsim's headshot never changes. The only (possible) way to make the default ideal plantsim's headshot change would be null editing his appearance in the mirror. Which isn't something I'm prepared to do. As it may cause corruption.

All I need is for the ideal plantsim's shocked / fried hairstyle texture to be fixed so that it matches the texture in the default thumbnail.

So you want the replica Ideal Plantsim to have the same texture as the original one?

The game reads the texture it already has, and if a sim comes out with an updated thumbnail and has a different texture (and you don't have any DRs), that's the texture that exists in the game.

If one of the sims is using an older thumbnail with a different texture, it's likely an older texture that no longer exists, so if you wanted that one, it would need to be remade.

I can't tell if the original texture is the darker or brighter one in your pictures, but this is the texture the game uses for the main hair. The other picture is the "AMhairshocked" hair with the texture, from the front, shown in Milkshape:
(LIFO, because the TXTR resource references LIFOs for 512x512 and above)

That looks like the first pic to me.

I'm almost certain the texture still exists. Since I swear the texture was consistent with the ideal plantsim's default thumbnail on my old Windows XP PC.

You're welcome to go looking for it.

I dont know which of the sims is the "original" thumbnail, but assuming it's the first one.

There are other differences between the thumbnails, too. The clothes and the sim's nose. I'm thinking the sim in the first pic is possibly a lower-res version (judging by the clothes), maybe using older resources that were updated after the thumbnails were generated. Could even be an edited TXMT setting, for all I know.

Not sure if shaders work in the thumbnails (they don't work for family CAS family thumbnails), but it could poentially be this, too. Bump map or similar. A lot of things can make a texture look different, even if it's the same one.

You were seeing other sims update when you took them to the mirror (the skin issue from the other topic), so I think it's just older/not updated graphics in the thumbnails.

My biggest question is why the ideal plantsim has the "shocked" hair, and not the plantsim hair... Seems weird. Could possibly be because he isn't a proper plantsim, but still, that hair is... a choice

It is the first one. But I could have sworn on the first PC where I had access to that hairstyle, the hairstyle texture was consistent with the default thumbnail, not my refreshed thumbnail.

ideal plantsim is just a regular Sim, not a PlantSim. I've already uploaded a headshot of him as an actual PlantSim though.

He doesn't have the Plantsim skin either.

That's right.