Not sure what happened but now it seems to be working.
only thing I started doing is changing some of the default materials from translucent to masked. I never had them as translucent but maybe during migration to U.E5.4 they changed.
also changed the default import project settings for them
the other thing i did was set viewport to 4 views and then zoomed on the topview.
again not certain this was the fix but it’s working.