With the knowledge of I was able to resolve my issue. Thanks for that btw if you would read this.
Its not really a single object. Its a group of many individual parts. I just had to disable the combine mesh function during the importation. So I work in 3ds on the materials etc than import the fbx within UE4 and that seem to work.
Does the Xref pipeline have any benefits ontop of the FBX pipeline?