Hello,
I never really thought about that actually. It would be quite a big drift but who knows. Maybe one day. Do you have any names of the program you mentioned above?

I recently came across a Cinema 4D plug-in, which includes a feature to convert "normal" 3d geometry to a Lego model, which, I assume, is what it's been looked for here. The number of bricks used to build up a Lego model is limited to a couple of standard bricks, though. See

http://www.c4dzone.com/en/shop/plug-ins-17/brickgen-1-0-265.htm

I think that such feature could in some cases help to define the overall shape of a Lego model, but for more extensive models supposed to consist of many different parts most work would still have to be done manually, since completely automating such complex process appears hardly feasible to me. However, I wonder if a feature to place a scalable plane with a picture mapped onto it on any axis, a commonly used technique to trace 3d models from 2d pictures in 3d apps, could help to create a MOC from scratch.

These are the ones I came across:

LSculpt - https://code.google.com/archive/p/lsculpt/
BrickR - http://lgg.epfl.ch/publications/2013/lego/
Brickify - https://brickify.it/

I haven't tried them out yet, just looked at the results other have made, and each of them only seem to use Bricks and/or Plates.

Interesting. Seems to be particularly useful for creating those life-size Lego scultpures. Besides deriving a digital MOC from a 3d model, another requirement would be to generate instructions to build these, as it's possibly very hard to do this without...