At the beginning of this thread I was very frustrated....the visible seam thing was driving me nuts and progress on my rock project was pretty much halted. But now I feel like I'm going from 'close but no cigar' to actually lighting up.

I've been experimenting with adding detail with light/dark distribution of the same material. But since Vue can't do cavity or AO mapping, it has to be done with an image map.

Here is an object created quickly in Metasequoia. In the upper left it has a Vue material that has bump of stretched and angled crystal basic repeater mixed with a touch of the terrain fractal eonite used earlier. In the upper right, I took the object into 3dCoat and painted with black in the cavities and a touch of white on the edges. Then in Vue, I mixed black with white via this map in the distribution box.

Then I simply pasted the first mat into the black and white mat boxes. Then I turned down the effects on the first making it darker. 

Then you can just move the mix slider for more effect or less.