well lol yesterday i figured all this out LOL.

The biggest issue with my model was when animating it the vertex normals would always try and point towards thier origin and cause those parts of the model to turn black.

well apparently by default the vertex normals are locked so i never knew to UNLOCK them. UNLOCKING them solved ALL my issues with the smoothing groups i was having. the smooth/hard tool now works PERFECTLY.

when viewing the vertex normal you can tell if they are unlocked by the way they look if they are unlocked each vertex normal will appear to have split up into 4 normals.