Hdrp view normals on unlit materials

[autumn trench]

I have a very simple fullscreen shader graph that is applied in a full screen custom pass. But for some reason it only works on lit materials (right) and just makes a smear of the lit normal on the unlit material (left). Why does this happen and can you not get the view normals of a unlit material in hdrp?

[timid moth]

In screen space, it's likely sampling the normals written to the gbuffer. If an object is not rendered in a deferred path(which is likely for an unlit material, since it doesn't need lighting), then there wouldn't be anything in the gbuffer.