Explosion VFX Project (Fullsail)

For this project I was trying to recreate an explosion from a truck crash shown in the first link. The way my explosion turned out was a little less visually what I expected. I was drawing blanks when I was trying to figure out how to create this explosion, so I went online and ended up finding a tutorial that looked a lot like what I was trying to accomplish. I used the tutorial as a base to figure out how to get started and from there I expanded and did my own tweaks. His didn’t match up to what mine looked like so I adjusted my project accordingly. I started off by starting off with a polygon sphere and I applied the explosion pyro FX and it set up my geometry to explode in a ball of fire and smoke. I then disabled the clamp to maximum so there was no limit to how big my fire could reach.  I then began to make tweaks in the pyro section, like Buoyancy lift, cooling rate, dissipation, Disturbance, shredding, turbulence, swirl, and division size. I then added a gas vortex confinement node. I didn’t know what this was at first, but I looked it up to find out what it is and compared it to just a plain vortex force. From what I got from the definitions, the vortex containment node is a boost to the swirl attribute, while just the vortex force would have spun the smoke like a tornado. Once that was all done I rendered it out so that I could jump from frame to frame without have to sim out every frame before.  Then the fun began. I created my camera, and applied the lights that looked the best and gave my smoke the best look. It got a 2 distant lights one for a key and another for its main light. I then applied the material to my pyro Fx called fireball. I placed a Mantra PBR render so I could get constant updates on what my render would look like.  Getting the fire to look correct was the hardest part of this project. I needed the explosion to be a red orange, but I could never get it to look quite right. I change to get the color from the heat vs. the temperature, because it gave me a better default color. I then changed my source range. To get the color to look as close to correct as possible. I gave the fire density a float ramp and adjusted were I felt was necessary.  Lastly I went to the color settings and unchecked the COP and Render Viewports and all that did was lower the gamma. Next was the smoke. For the smoke density, I gave it a hill preset for the ramp and then I adjusted the final amplitude. In order to make the cloud look think. I started at 10 and slowly went down until it matched my reference, which was at about 4.  For the color of the smoke I tried to get it so that the fire that disappears in the air to turn grey while I wanted to keep the rest black. It sort of worked except it looked like a black cloud of smoke with the sun giving it highlights around the edges. I then began to mess with the shadow density and to try and make them look realistic. I lastly gave it a volume light in order to make it look like the fire was glowing.  And after that I was pretty much done, all I have to do is render.  Render took a lot longer than expected. Roughly 8 hours and still not finished rendering. The only problem I have is the red spots on the explosion. Could never figure out how to make it look right.