Ways to have smoke resolve to an image?

[dearthman]

So, I'm fairly new to houdini, and one of my first uses of it unfortunaly has been to try to have a smoke simulation fill the camera frame and resolve to a color image in the process. I know normally the easy way to do this would be to map a solid volume full of smoke, blow it away, and then reverse the animation, however there are colliders involved in the scene as well and so would be obvious the smoke is running in reverse if I did that in this case. I came up with a convoluted solution which was to create 3 fields the same size as my pyro volume with attributes that run 0-1 along each dimension, essentially creating a uvw coordinate field, then simming the smoke, then importing that sim into a sop, reversing that simulation using a timeshift node, and then creating a sop solver with a vdb advect that used the reversed smoke simulation to advect my UVW field all the way to through the animation, and use that resulting field to assign color to the smoke for each frame. It....worked, miraculously, however it is a lot of steps and I'm not sure if there is an easier way, which there probably is! So, I'm just curious how people who actually know houdini would have done what I was trying to, maybe with rest volumes or something else that I don't know much about...