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My name is Anaïs and I'm confused.
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It is an important matter and you should always have this habit in your work : when you are designing an asset, and working on the 3D model, take some breaks and check it from the camera angle you will have in game. It will spare you working on beautiful yet useless details, letting you save time and performance budget on whatever will never be seen in game and thus will be discarded (either by you – best case – or the GPU's depth buffer – worst case, will angry the Gods of Optimization).
This will also allow you to have a better vision of what's happening and help you work more on the global shape, colors, contrast to help highlight the important parts of the asset, and have a more defined art style in game.
TThis comes with the ingame camera angle rule. If the object is no more than 100px on screen, please, it doesn't need to be highpoly. Most engine work good with LODs (levels of details – create differents submeshes identical but with less geometry for when the object is far in the background), you can also do it manually. But the absolute rule here is to always take the object at the biggest size it will take on the screen, and design it to fit no more than this size without being over-subdivised. You can rely instead on texture to give it a more detailed look if that's a need, like normal maps and ambiant occlusion.
Faces that will never be seen in game (for example, the ones in contact with the ground, interior of houses seen from the street, etc...) should always be deleted. It's ok if the mesh has an open hole, we don't need those faces.
Also, Ngones are heresy. Gods of Black Magic will punish you through the local technical artist if you do not retopologize your meshes in the holy way. It is like having an inverted crucifix in a church for catholics.
If you want it short : sharp edge are FORBIDDEN and it is by both laws.
Sharp edges are in Blender, Hard edges are in Maya, they are the two sides of the same coin of atrocities. You have to make them Smooth (Blender) or soft (Maya).
If you want the explanation : Every vertice has informations, including position, orientation, and... normals. If you harden the edges, it's like you split it and carry the double of informations, and thus break the Law of Optimization. Worse than that, if, in a shader, you decide to modify the position of the vertex (yes, you can do that), it will look like your mesh is open, because each face will have its own vertex instead of being sealed together and they will divorce and go away from each others. : ( you can trick a sharp edge using a short and subtle bevel instead)
I emphase the fact that only and only the local technical artist you're affiliated to can take the decision of using more materials than one on a single mesh. It is very important according to the Law of Optimization !!
The more materials you have, the more drawcalls the CPU sends to the GPU to display everything. It means more processing time and it has a cost. Consider yourself poor, and make the economy. Several things can help you using one material, the first thing is to have a clear idea of how you want the asset to be displayed, and what is its purpose. Then, you can use UVs and textures to carefuly reach the desired outcome, and if required, your local technical artist can help you find solution, or give you the permit (mandatory) to use more materials. This is a typical case where the Law of Shaders can be contradictory, and the best solution to find and agreement is 1) to be really wise when asking for that permission (it should be an exception and should always be for a good purpose) and 2) better follow the Law of Optimization strictly everywhere else so the Gods of Black Magic can see how good of a developper you are and they will have mercy and grant you the Right to break this specific rule through the local technical artist.
Please never forget this step. The local technical artist is also granted an executive power by the Gods of Black Magic and you don't want to make them angry at you.
Before exporting your mesh, please make sure to set correctly the pivot of the object where it should be according to the object (in most case, it is at the center bottom where it would be in contact with the ground or other related object, but can be anywhere else depending of the situation), and to set it at a position, scale and rotation coordinate of (0, 0, 0). If you do not, the local technical artist will ask you to export everything again until it is done correctly
Also, please keep private what is done in private. Nobody wants to see the awful and dirty things you've done to that poor default cube, and delete your history. That heavy data is none of the engine's business and its embarassing. Do yourself a favor, delete your history.
If you have multiple object that assemble together but for some reason have to be exported as multiple meshes, please, do your own composition, and then set every pivot at (0, 0, 0), so you can export each mesh separately as .fbx.
If those object do not need to be separate in the engine, you should always merge (or join) them, check if the UVs are not messed up, create a texture atlas combining everything required, and then you can export.