So i've been doing quite a bit of importing the last few days to fix models, but everything is coming in broken up in pieces with no smoothing information, everything is a hard edge.

Never had this problem before, would really appreciate it if anyone had any ideas

Yup. I had this with the Lee Perry head model. Ended up opening in max, exporting as fbx and importing back in.

Did you delete the history before exporting the original mesh?

hmmm, i'l have to check with the person who exported.
i was getting it across the board with a lot of different models from different sources so i figured it was a obj importer issue

thanks for the help