To be honest no, but it really helps! Or just steal from someone else style like I did.
First of all, what is drawing skills?
Firstly, it helps to be able to design a character in 2D, and make a drawing so that you can model them in 3D.
WARNING making a 2D character into 3D can make a good looking character on paper suddenly look much more disturbing in 3D, but this is normal, This is because of the uncanny effect. The more realistic you get (2d to 3D with shading adds a level of realism), the less room you have for error, so the easier for anything strange to stick out and look bad.
I notice that most character models look bad when you are editing them, but once you make a render, because you are not moving the camera around trying to inspect the model, anything that could look bad tends not to show up, so renders tend to make the model looks better than when you are editing and posing them.
but this is not necessary
Secondly and Lastly, the main advantage to having drawing skill isn't to draw a character, it is to know what things you can try to make your character look better, skills to self evaluate your work.
My case, for instance, most artists start out trying to be realistic, eventually, you realize no one gives a damn about realism, exaggeration and simplicity are their own art forms that need to be mastered and exaggeration is the key to successful art (more important in 2D art than 3D but still applies) exaggeration requires that you already be skilled in simplifying, simplifying requires you to have art and drawing skill so you need to know what things are important, what to keep, what can be exaggerated, what effects tend to lead to what, etc. Skills like gesture lines, lines of action, unique silhouettes, color theory, knowledge of some physics (light polarization, human anatomy, humanoid locomotion, mental tricks you can do with things like line weight or perception), can all help enhance plain images and renders.
Have a style.
What is a style?
A style is not a skill or technique you mastered and is your own,
a style is what you get when you get tired of trying to make great realistic art and instead start making
compromises
Using a set of tricks to compromise on your work is great because it helps speed up your art style and make it simpler and easy to make. For example, shade or no shading. Shading is better, but takes more time. infact, you may find it has deminishing returns on investment (meaning, lot more work to do, and not that much better looking). Cell shading (just one color shadows) is a great way to add the effect of shading without hardly any work (great bang per buck).
In my case, I am no longer doing 3D art, because it takes more work to make (lots of prep work) and it is harder to make look good (being 3D it is already more realistic, even if you try to make a cartoonish 3D thing, and the more realistic it is the less wiggle room you have to make mistakes or design choices and the harder it is to self evaluate because your mind wants to think in terms of realism), I am focusing on cartoony 2D art.
Literally, last week found and mastered the art style I want to make. It is 2D vector art with very minimal shading (mostly some red under the knees, breast and in the face). I have a model in 3D which I pose (I did not make a character mesh, it is more like globs of clay in the shape to build a body, globs of clay work great because they help make the 3D render look more abstract so you are less likely to trace and instead just getting the feeling of the gesture lines, and blobs that do not smoothly connect with each other means you have landmarks to use as references as you add in details, which are harder to find on a fully made character mesh.) using 2D vector is a great way to simulate a hand-drawn look when you don't have a tablet to draw with, or a very clean look, I could do several characters and poses a day if I wanted to, as well as I can take the vectors into blender to animate them
.
But do you need to study all of that... nah. Why?
there is a saying, good artist copy, but great artist steal.
Basically take things you like, steal them, and mash them up together, such as I once did a study on how to make eyes for a code lyoko character, using a trick to get it right every time, I found that if I smoothed the lines the trick worked great to make another style of eyes I really liked but could never master before.
So find an art style you like, try to see if you can mimic it.
my issue is body proportions, how far to draw the knees from the hip, hip to torso, hip width, etc, which is why I looked at a lot of styles, tried to find my favorite, then use 3D models to do the work for me, just pose, evaluate if the silhouette is good, if the gesture lines are good, if the line of action is good, and then I know it will look good when I make it a 2D drawing. I should practice drawing people more and studying anatomy more, but I am lazy, this is good enough and just as fast as if I were a pro. So don't feel like you need to master it all, just get good at shortcuts. Cell shading, for example, is a great short cut, it really brings life to an image and it doesn't take a crazy amount of work, using glancing highlight is another way to make an image pop to life with minimal work. Really, you just test things or find things and steal it, same as getting good at using blender, what video, learn a trick, use it. It's how I was able to make a automated procedural skin shader for blender
oh, and one other last skill. Not a drawing skill, but you can all take ideas from photography and the film industry to improve your work. Such as good composition to make renders look less... fake, or good story presentation techniques (like the 180 rule or something, which I never really bothered remembering). Even skills from engineering can help , like the 80/20 rule and such.
any skill you learn in life could probably be applied to improving 3D art. If you want any details just ask, but most of the time I can send links to a video that does better at explaining.
