i’ve been using blender for months now, and this is the only time this has happened.
to the right are the unwrapped uvs. there are triangles there, as you see. but they are actually quads with two verts seemingly snapped together. plus most of them aren’t welded together.
Usual things are remove doubles (select all vertices and W / remove doubles) and check for any flipped faces or faces that are inside your mesh. Without having your blend file I cannot say definitively
You have some inverted face normals, select all the vertices and Ctrl+N, then unwrap again.
In the Editing (F9) / Mesh Tools More panel you can select to draw the face normals. You can also flip selected faces with W / Flip Normals
hey, long as you’re here (seriously, you’ve saved me three hours’ worth of grief)
what do you think is the best ao settings?
i use pixel cache, approximate, and correction set to 1