Normal map issues

Leinadien

I'm baking a normal and occlusion map for my models in xnormal, but some of the maps have issues. The normals are all facing the right direction so I don't know why this happens. One of the maps is of two shoulderpads, see how one of them has nasty squares all over it while the other is smooth. Why does this happen?

ZacD

Make sure that you don't have any hard edges or separate smoothing groups in those areas. 

Leinadien

What are edge edges, you mean double vertexes? And smoothing groups, the normals of the mesh? The normals are identical and there is no double geometry. One shoudler pad works the other doesnt...just odd. Tried to bake the map in both zbrush and xnormals, same result. So it's definitely the model it's something wrong with, but have no idea what's wrong with it.

ZacD

Sorry, I meant hard edges. 

Elrinion

Yeah, this looks like a smoothing problem. Make sure it's all in one group or different groups for where you want hard edges.

Leinadien

No I don't think there are any hard edges, they're both identical as far as I can tell. But I'm definitely missing something, anyone mind having a look and pointing out what I'm missing, I would appreciate it. It's a very small file.
http://www.filedropper.com/pad

CharacterCarl

If there aren't any hard edges on the model itself (please also check the exported file, not just the mesh in your scene) you might want to take a look at the settings of the low-poly mesh inside xNormal. There is an option that determines whether to use the information from the file or all hard or soft edges: