thanks guys, and kat I now remember your previous posts. did you ever turn those into a tutorial?
in this case I don't want to tweak the textures as several of them are intended to be used on different models, so I think your suggestion of hiding the seams in cracks is the best solution. I have used that technique before with single rocks so it should be reasonably straight forward.
edit: although it was quite easily to model a deep crack in the meshes to hide the texture seam, I didn't realise the shared spec map would look wrong. as shown in the image below. I don't want to make unique spec maps so I'm going back to the previous version of the mesh and see what else I can do.
@ dersaidin, don't worry I won't spend long on the seam, and I intend to start work on the 3rd section over the next couple of days, if real life doesn't get in the way too much.
![](https://www.katsbits.com/community/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fs104.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fm177%2Fratty_redemption%2Fth_image813.jpg&hash=322549f736aab4525aba3800bfd1502f7048fcdb)