(who is in reality vegan und likes to pet kittens but psssst, dont tell anyone)
My orc after the paint lectures. I noticed that, when rendered in cycles, some dark spots appear (belly and inside of the legs) the mesh normals are ok and there are also no double faces, textures seem to be ok too.
It renders fine in evee though…
Like sharp edges shadow … ?
I’ve problems like these too. I thought it was the normal map, but nothing strange there.
It follows the low poly edges.
Yes, exactly.
Using the “make planar faces” (I kept my faces as quads) helped a bit but some are still black.
(triangulating didn’t help either )
I think, we are missing some thing?
Forgot to select and option or wrong way in baking …
It puzzles me!
Me too! 
Well Some experimenting showed the darkspots can be lit , which makes it even stranger 
Moving the vertices a bit helps sometimes, so it is most likely caused by a bad or to lowpoly mesh…
Smooth vertices helped a lot , but caused new artifacts in adjacent areas sometimes
And it shouldn’t be use carelessly, since it DOES change the geometry 
(Well no artifacts at least, that’s SOMETHING ^^)
So, still no REAL solution just some easing of the problem
Nice study. I have the feeling, that it is a simple problem, but somehow it eludes me.
In a next model, I go for a higher subdivision.
Someone else on this forum had, this type of problems too. In the lamp section. But his problem was, multiple faces. So vertex merging solved his problem.
maybe, as the tutor also does it, use the knife tool to add more local geometry.
I love the last image, a Martian Orc
Don’t give up. This is Blender, not always 100% solid solutions.
It looks to me like terminator artifacts. This is something that ray tracing render engines can produce when the lighting is too stark. Perhaps adding some softer lights from other angles to soften the shadows will lower the amount of artifacts that are produced when cycles terminates the break between shadows and light rays.
There’s also a new setting in 2.9 I believe that aims to reduce terminator artifacts in Cycles with various settings to play around with the code for which has been recycled from another open-source render engine.
Very very helpful, thanks a lot good Sir 
Loving the vegan orc! 
You can tell he’s a nice person from his expression 
