Tiling Issue with Rebelway technique

[BenjaminMarkus]

I've been working my way through the free Rebelway asset creation courses and the same tiling method is being used in both of the first two parts for COPs and VOPs tiling. However, I ran into a snag around 4:27:00 of the first masterclass, where Saber bakes out the flattened Torus to assist in tiling the texture. Perhaps, I did something wrong when rendering it out of Mantra, but my rendered texture looks correct, and I'm getting some bizarre banding when trying to implement it in the Tiling Part 2 section as well as the tiling section of the second VOPs course even though I seem to have everything hooked up properly. I posted this question in the YouTube discussion, but no response and it seems like someone else posted the same issue on there already. In any case, I wrote Rebelway to ask if they still had the assets, which they don't and informed me that the course was discontinued because they need to update it for use with the latest version of Houdini. So, I'm wondering if it's possible that SideFX changed something under the hood in Houdini 18.5 that's messing with this workflow, or am I just improperly baking out the texture?

bake_torus_scale_1_1_1K.exr