I design decorative door hardware and face the same issues you do. What I do is create my ornate design details in Moi (it is actually rather fast and accurate for me to design organic shapes in Moi using sweeps and curves) then those details are imported to a solidworks part. The only downside is that you can't edit the imported details in solidworks.

It ends up being a rather labor intensive process to make revisions to these parts, so I spend most of my time getting the design details right the first time in order to limit revisions. Theoretically a good solidworks modeler could create those organic details in solidworks, I'm just not a good solidworks person nor do I want to be :P.

You could use blender to model out the organic details, then import them to rhino and combine your solidworks/rhino/whatever base model in there. But again, your going to lose editablity features, and you can't export the polygonal mesh into any format that is manufacturable.

Attached are two parts made using modo to sculpt the organic portions then imported into rhino and combined with the base portion that was modeled in Rhino. Then an .STL file was made as well as plastic prototypes, however we weren't able to supply our vender with any other types of files since you can't export polygonal mesh into any machinable file format. So I imagine they simply had to remodel it from scratch or they scanned the parts with a 3d scanner. We weren't very happy with the detail on the knob, but I suppose if we were to put more energy into it could be done better.


Hope that helps somewhat