Shading's flat and looks horrible.

[CaptainExtremis]

I recently built this small button model and baked the diffuse, glossy, and normal textures to images, but the shading looks like this:

https://imgur.com/a/EP0y0Tz

The object shading is also set to smooth, so it's not that. Has anybody encountered this before?

[mr munkee]

I think I've run into this before a long time ago but it was when I wasn't as experienced and I don't remember what I did.

That object doesn't look like it needs a normal map at all, basically the normals by default don't need to be modified, and so having a normal map applied that basically doubles what the normals already are might cause this weird flat shading artifacting. Or maybe you baked the flat shading into the normal? What does the normal map look like?

[CaptainExtremis]

Well, I was using a normal map to bake the details of a procedural texture, so that might be part of the problem.

Here's the texture:
https://imgur.com/gYWpV6B

[Shas'Ui Demotana]

I'm no expert in this stuff, but I'd guess it might have something to do with the ray distance you've set when you were baking the normal map. Try messing with that, see if something changes.
Also, this is presuming you're baking the normal map from a more detailed version of the model. I'm not sure if you can do anything in this regard with just one mesh. Seems kind of obsolete to me.

Blender Guru has a solid tutorial on this subject, from what I remember
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r-cGjVKvGw

[CaptainExtremis]

Not baking from a hipoly mesh, just the texture. I don't have room to set up my tablet for this PC and I don't want to use my mouse for sculpting details, so...

[mr munkee]

I'm going to assume that it's what I said about double normals basically. I don't see a reason this object has a normal map, because a normal map is to get details that won't physically exist. If the object already matches the normals you're trying to project on it then it doesnt need a normal map.

Maybe a different method that's used for what you might be trying to do is data transfer of the normal data. But it juat doesn't seem like that's even necessary since like you said you aren't baking from a high poly mesh.

So my thoughts: Your object has no need for a normal map of it's own normals which it already has naturally, and that's whats causing the issue.

[CaptainExtremis]

You're definitely right, but that leaves me with the problem of getting the details I want on the base of the button w/o a normal map.

Here's a closeup the base with the procedural texture, hopefully you can see it:
https://imgur.com/a/NOTUwlF

Is there a way to save those details?