Sorry for the confusion. I think using Suzanne is muddying the waters. Let me give the real-world example that alerted me to this as I think that might help.

Appreciate the heads up. I'll make the request on the other channel. I think this is an important issue, as the ability to isolate volumetrics in your render passes is critical for VFX.

Out of curiosity, I opened the scene in 2.83.5. Rendered there with GPU and CPU. Absolutely no artifacts.

I tested today with the October 12th build of 2.91 and can confirm that I'm still getting artifacts with both GPU and CPU.

This seems to be an issue with GPU rendering. I rendered with Cycles using CPU instead of GPU and got no blocky artifacts.

Ah! Thank you! The "Advanced Numerical Input Mode" was the issue. I'm not sure how it got turned on but disabling it fixed the problem.

Any follow up to this? I tried loading the provided sample into the latest build (5/27/2020) and it's still not displaying correctly, whereas it does in 2.82a.

All good points. The reason this seemed like a bug to me is that I loaded in a curve object and didn't see all the curves.

Here's a stripped down version of the file. It looks fine in 2.82a. Display is broken in 2.3 beta. But the data is still there. If you go into Edit mode, you can see it. Just not in object mode.

Got it. Thanks for the help. I didn't realize there was a "compress" checkbox in the file save. Only saw it in the Prefs. Looks like the file save option works. But the Prefs one doesn't seem to have any impact.

Danny, if you haven't seen it already, there's a dedicated FBX Import/Export addon on the Blender market. I've tested it and can say that it overcomes most (if not all) of the native FBX issues in Blender.

I've isolated the problem. It's the AnimAll addon. If AnimAll is enabled, QuickSmoke will not be visible in the viewport.

Thanks for the help! Just tried this and it totally works. However this process is a bit obscure. I'm sure it's just my lack of understanding of how scene instancing and collections work under the hood. I'd like to suggest a new menu item:

I tried to simplify the object but the simplified object loads into 2.81 without a problem. That said, I'm attaching the full version. Here are the steps to reproduce.

Thanks! I tried with the latest build and could not reproduce it, so I think it's resolved.

Hmmm... It's still not working for me on the latest build:

This no longer crashes in the recent builds. Thanks for the help!

The Thread option will only be visible if you're using Cycles as your renderer. So switch your rendering engine and you'll be able to reduce your threads. After that, you can switch back to Eevee and it should work fine.

I can confirm as well that setting rendering threads to 1 resolves the issue but setting rendering threads to anything above 1 causes problems.

Many thanks for your continued endurance in looking into this!

Also, for what it's worth, Collada has the same basic problem as FBX. From what I can tell, this issue has less to do with the FBX format in particular and more to do with how Blender interprets and deals with hierarchies.

Since you asked for a smaller file, here you go. It's a 1MB file. It has a mere 4 mesh objects and a paltry 3 bones. That's about as simple as it gets.

Bastien, I understand the desire for small and simple files, however if you only ever test small and simple files, then you'll never encounter the types of problems that we're reporting here. These problems don't come up in simple cases. They come up in real-world cases where you have layers upon layers of bones in a hierarchy.

Forgot to add that this only crashes if you choose "Selected Object" when prompted by Blender.

I'm changing the status on this from "Incomplete" because I've supplied the FBX files needed to test this and resolve it. I've changed the Priority to "High" because this issue severely impacts interoperability with other 3D applications. With Blender having adopted LMB as a standard, it's clear that 2.8 is designed to appeal to new Blender users. Those coming from other applications will need a working FBX importer in order to migrate assets and take advantage of Blender's powerful toolset.

Here is what the animation should look like.

Sure thing. Check these out. The FBX should load into Blender like it does into Maya, UE4, etc. However it does not, as you can see in the attached screen shot.