Cannon Fire; Smoke not travelling far enough

[puriAgg]

Hi everyone, 

I require some help on this effect, and getting it to match my reference. (1:42), (2:50) 

 

In the reference, the smoke is travelling quite far away from the cannon at rapid velocity. However, I cannot produce a similar smoke shooting out of the cannon with my current setup. I had started out with v015 with minimal vel in my scene and pumped it up by a lot in v021, only to create awkward looking mushroom shapes. So, I am not sure how to approach this smoke (maybe separate the flames and smoke, then do the smoke with POPs and turning it into volume). Furthermore, I cannot get my flames to cool down fast enough (2 to 5 frames). I tried using the cooling rate parameter on pyro solver and the gas dissipate node to accelerate the cooling of the flames but its still not fast enough. There are also some white chunks of flames remaining at the end of the cool down, when they should have been the first to disappear. Below, I have attached my simplified hip file and 2 flipbooks. Please help, thank you!

cannonFire_fx_odforce_v021.mov

cannonFire_fx_v015.mov

cannonFire_fx_odforce_v021.hipnc

old_warship_cannon_fire.mp4

[Eckxter]

For starters, fast moving smoke like this is a bit tricky to control with the default solver.
There are multiple ways to approach this.

For the fire not going away fast enough, that is actually quite easily done post-sim.
Having the fire (not) visible is not much more than a matter of visualization (or in other words, shading).
A couple of ways to do this.
One way would be, if you're happy with how the motion due to buoyancy is going, you can use a VolumeWrangle to reduce the heat/temperature values post-sim.
Of course, using a Volume Visualization SOP to look at your sim outside of DOPs.
So no matter how long your heat/temperature is lingering, you can just say "from this frame, I don't want to see any of it anymore".

For the movement of the smoke, my first thought is using the GAS Repeat trick.
Found here: https://vimeo.com/164664923