[gameprogrammer] Texturing large terrain

I have a script that takes an 8 bit heightmap and a list of height ranges with 
textures for each.  It outputs a static mesh file that I can load into my 3d 
framework along with a couple of procedurally blended transition textures.  
This looks nice, but it's very repetitive and the elevation levels are really 
only useful for moving from plains to mountains and so forth.
I'm to a point where I'm going to want some detail textures on top of the base 
terrain, things like roads, clearings, etc.  In Blender I can make a nice 
terrain, put a tiled grass texture on it and then paint dirt where I want using 
a single alpha map for blending.  From there I can add as many modification 
layers as I want so I might have a layer for extra terrain detail and a layer 
for roads.  I can then bake that into a single large texture.

I guess my question is, what's the best way to go about this?  Ultimately I 
intend to procedurally chunk up the terrain so that it can be culled, so just 
making a single texture per chunk could work, but that means my texture memory 
for terrain is going to be much higher and will increase in size with the 
terrain, not to mention I think that will make my mipmap transitions look more 
obvious and unnatural.
I've seen some techniques for splatting using shaders or multitexture as well, 
but it looks like I have to have one alpha map per transition.
Has anyone dealt with this?  What kind of solution would you all suggest?

Thanks,

Vince~



      

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