It's a good question. I wish I had a straightforward answer. Sculpties will probably never be as powerful as arbitrary meshes, but it is possible to do some amazing things with them.
They are being used to create both humans and animals. Here are a couple of posts that I found in the "Show Us Your Sculpties" thread.
Chip Midnight also put out a tutorial for using projection to create sculpties from arbitrary meshes, although I don't think the technique works well in all cases. He also mentions a method using conform, but to my knowledge this has never been described in detail and I'm not sure how it works. I haven't had time to play with it yet.
There is also realXtend, which is an alternative to OpenSim. RealXtend is an open source server and client that supports arbitrary meshes directly. I believe some of this capability is in the process of being ported into OpenSim. But SecondLife doesn't support this yet, so it is of no use of SecondLife is your target grid.
Also, I'd like to add some tools to Prim Composer to help convert an arbitrary mesh to sculpties, but there are many other tasks ahead of it. I won't be able to look at it before January.
So, the best answer I can give is that it is possible to do what you want, but not necessarilly in the way that you want to do it. Sculpties definitely require more work to create than traditional meshes, but it is possible to use them to create highly detailed and realistic builds.
Hopefully, someone with more experience creating sculpties will post their ideas on the subject. At the moment, I'm just too deep in tool building to have a clear look at the larger picture.
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