For anyone interested in doing game development without spending a bazillion dollars on the Unreal engine, Garage Games now has a beta version of the Maya2DTS exporter for the Torque Game Engine. It is not feature-complete yet, but it has been pretty solid for me. The exporter is currently only available for Windows, but Mac and Linux versions are in development.

The Garage Games community is also always on the lookout for 3D artists. If you're looking to get some experience working on game projects, not just modding, you should definitely check out the community. There are some good projects (and some bad, of course) that might be good for new artists wanting to get some actual development experience.