Alternative to Unity Terrain and Caves

We have a game where we need an open landscape, and a lot of holes/stairs leading into dungeon/cave systems underneath (right down on (relatively) even terrain, not into a mountain side).

We are trying to get it seamless without a loading screen/portals when walking down, so we ended up searching for an alternative way to do it without unitys terrain.

For the LOD our artist split his terrain meshes into chunks i’m activating/deactivating now and switching between different lods depending on where the player is moving. This seems to work pretty good so far, one bigger problem we ran into was the texturing.

The best we found yet was the 4 Layer terrain shader from the wiki unifycommunity.com which gives us 4 stencil/layers to work with, however it drops some graphic card support because it needs 5 textures to work.

I was just wondering if there might be a better solution for something like this i am overlooking, if anyone could point me in the right direction i’d really appreciate it.

There are two alternatives for caves I know of, but both of them are paid assets:

Voxel Form

And

Caves & Overhanging Cliffs System (not yet released)