Usually this happens because the texture artist cuts out each section in the map and then has the background black (which looks cool and professional when you present it to other devs but in practice it's always best to just let your base texture fill it out to avoid this). Sometimes the raw UV map gets exported in a low resolution and then the artist blows it up to work on, which can make each section slightly inaccurate (thus the texture drawn is slightly smaller than the actual boundary so you get these black lines).
Wouldn't the smart texture/material system prevent stuff like this from happening?
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