Since I’ve joined Harmonix, I’ve watched the artist draw more heads than an entire projects worth of concept at Turbine. It’s just baked into the process here, and the same holds true for the rest of the design and implimentation. Ryan, the art director at Harmonix, often hires students from his class for these positions.

The reasons for this are simple: Someone with excellent traditional art skills will be a better artist in the long run than someone without these skills. They’ll make the transition to 3d modeling and texturing just fine. As long as they can draw fast and take direction, they’re immediately useful in the concept phase and require hardly any ramp up.

Additionally, 3d modeling is not what it used to be. ZBrush is changing the industry. I’ve watched an artist with no 3d experience pick up ZBrush and create compelling models within a day or two. Sure, the mesh isn’t fit for the engine, but when you’re just casting normal maps you don’t really care. You rough out the shape, model in the details, and hand it off to someone else to do the in-engine modeling. It won’t be long until much of this will be easy to automate as well.

In the end, a good artist is a good artist, regardless of the tools.

Starting with indie development is definately a good idea though, regardless of whether the person wants to be a concept artist, an animator, a programmer, etc. I’d suggest not limiting oneself to commercial indie development either. Working on freeware projects is plenty fine, the same goes for game modding as well, so long as some degree of dedication is applied.

By the way, the October GAMES magazine has articles about CMU’s Master of Entertainment Technology program and the Wii. The latter is nothing you don’t already know, but in my mind it’s a sign of great publicity for the “let’s get people to play games” concept.

Instead, what happens is you pay your dues for a few years making textures to use on sand dunes, or high-polygon models of chairs and tables, and then if you haven’t left the industry in disgust you can try out some cool stuff.

As far as a student who has good concept art but then claims not to be able to do animation or modelling or textures or anything, I would be *shocked* in this day and age to meet an art student — especially one who wants to break into the game industry! — with no practical experience in anything other than drawing. What kind of university would allow such a student to graduate? Isn’t this what a core curriculum is supposed to provide?

But I’ll agree with you that I can’t imagine such people getting jobs in the industry even if they do exist. At this point there’s no excuse for not being proficient in Max, Maya and Photoshop at the very least.