Hey Nas! Good question.
In regards to the modifiers that alter the shading, I usually leave those on our mesh and have the exporter apply them when exporting the models. That saves me from having to add another modifier to tweak the shading if I change the model for any reason. Blender makes it really nice to be able to apply those prior to export by default, so you do not even have to set anything up. Just need to export!
For the smaller gem at the bottom, a spoiler but what we end up doing later in the course is completely switching out the mesh data for the lowpoly gem we’ve created already. We are essentially getting two gems for the price (or effort) of one. It may be a little tough to understand right now, but we will touch on that in a later video once we are done the texturing stage!
