Ambient occlusion bake crashes blender (cycles)

Question

I can't get an ambient occlusion bake to work with my file; every time I try to bake, Blender crashes. I'm using cycles render, and my object is pretty low-poly. There might be some weird geometry in it, but the UV unwrap worked alright.

I'm using Blender 2.78 on a MacBook.

I've tried having the image texture node selected, both edit mode and object mode, checking and unchecking "clear", and creating a blank texture image to put the UV onto.

I'm absolutely new to Blender, so please let me know what other info is necessary! Here's the .blend:

Answer 1

The main reason for the crash is dupliframes (not really expected behaviour though).

The object has Frames enabled in the Properties editor > Object tab > Duplication rollout. It duplicates the object as many times as there are frames set (from 1 to 100), resulting in ~44 000 faces. It isn't visible as object is static.

Also with this the object won't be renderable. Set the option to None and the bake will work.

There are some minor problems though in mesh geometry (non-manifold geometry) which are better to fix. Although they won't crash the bake:

1. Remove doubles (W > Remove Doubles) and recalculate normals (Ctrl+N) first, this will remove some of the non-manifold geometry.

2. Edges overlayed on top of the faces (moved with Grab tool below for visualization purposes):

   

   To avoid UV map corruption delete one edge, then select vertices from the sides and use Connect Vertex Path tool with J to split the face as it kind of was. Repeat for the other edges shown in the screenshot above.

   

   Above selected edge was already made as mentioned.

3. Internal vertex inside of the mesh.

   

   Above faces of the body are hidden to allow seeing through the mesh. Remove that vertex.