I have wanted to recreate some spectacular photos in Blender, but I can not get the “smoke” to act/look like anything in these images.
There are three main types of “smoke” that I want to immitage.
First is the cloud of steam from the deludge system. Basically, the rocket flash steams a bunch of water that protects the launch pad.
Second is the thick and opaque smoke of the SRBs.
Third is the translucent exhaust of the main engines.
Really… 
… so what have you done? 
This will requires a few different smoke simulations with Force Field effects. Probably would have to composite them together at the end for best results. See video example:
Fail mostly. I didn’t save the work. I’ll post something after I remake my failed attempt.
So, here are two renders with different intensities on the material. Trying to get the gradiant from white to yellow to orange to brown as the photo above does.
One thing I like to do with “fire and smoke” is to render several different versions, then composite them together in a fairly-random fashion. Alter the speed of some of the strips. Start and re-start them at different points in their timeline. Freely play with opacity. Tint one. The sky’s the limit. You get a very chaotic effect that is very easy to control and cheap, since once each piece has been rendered (to a MultiLayer OpenEXR file), it’s just 2D post-processing from that point on.
I tired compositing them together to get a color gradient, with add nodes but lost on the detail.
