Which Skill is More Vital for Mechanical Engineers: Illustrator or 3D Modeling?

[basty]

For a Mechanical Engineering student, which one is the most needed skill? Illustrator (which can create a cutaway illustration of a car such as below image) or a 3D modeler (which can create a 3D surface model of a car)?

 

[billy_joule]

Illustrator is for graphic design and is no use for engineering.
If you are interested in auto engineering I think most manufacturers use NX:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_NX

All of the major solid modelling packages can do cutaways.

 

[boneh3ad]

Illustrator is for graphic design and is no use for engineering.

That a bit of an exaggeration. I use it pretty extensively for making graphics for scientific publications, though it doesn't require me to know how to use it all that well and certainly isn't worth learning instead of a parametric solid modeling tool.

 

[billy_joule]

That a bit of an exaggeration.

Yes, I guess it is.
Come to think of it, I've used Corel Draw (a vector graphics editor, like Illustrator) twice in my engineering degree, once to arrange DXF's (exported from solidworks) for laser cutting and once for poster design. I don't know why we were required to use Draw for DXF prep, we had access to more appropriate 2D drafting software.
Time spent on corel draw was probably 1/1000 of the time spent on SW over the degree. Pretty much all mechanical engineering job listings mention CAD, I've never once seen any vector graphics editors mentioned.