Weird gradient issues with normal map

[Vismay]

So i made these 2 brick meshes and i’m having this weird issue with this gradient that shows up. This is my exact workflow for both these meshes, but it happens only on one of them for some reason. The mesh on the left has this gradient thing but the one on the right doesn’t.

Modeled the low poly in max, added a chamfer. Took it to zbrush, did some edge damage, took it to SP, baked the normal map, brought the lowpoly to UE. I made the texture in SP as well, on a 2mx2m plane and used that as the texture. The texture itself has its own normal map, so ive used the normal map blending method to mix the 2.

This is the material setup.

What I’ve tried so far:

1. On fbx export from max, tried unchecking Tangents and Binormals.
2. Reset normals on the mesh using a edit normals modifier and clicking reset.
3. Re-doing the smoothing using a smooth modifier set to auto smooth and 45 degree angle.
4. On import into unreal, checking/unchecking recompute tangents and normals.
5. Flipping green channel (it just flips the direction of the gradient).

[Stephen.Phillips]

It’s low res, but the baked normals look a little fishy to me. If they are tangent normals I would expect the brick to be mostly one solid color with just the edges slightly different. There are large parts there that have a different angle. Maybe something went wrong with your baking setup. You should be able to disconnect that normal map from the graph and see the problem fixed.

I always like to debug the normals with the view mode “Buffer Visualization > World Normals”. The default editor cube will be the ground truth for where the normals should be facing. It will help you understand what’s off about your normal maps.