There is smoke in front of the fire and overlapping the fire, when the fire should be turning into smoke. I used the “smoke and fire option” but it seems to emit it together which doesn’t seem very natural. If I just use the “fire” option, it does not produce nearly enough smoke even when set to produce the maximum amount in the “Smoke Flames” tab.
The end of the meteor should be pure fire that turns into smoke as it cools off, like in this image:
The smoke and fire seem too small scale. I want the meteor to look big, but I have no idea how to change the real life scale that Blender will use to compute the smoke.
For example, the smoke in my image looks relatively smooth, and the bumps are all pretty large which makes the smoke look small. But in this image the smoke looks huge because the bumps on the smoke are all small and detailed:
As the smoke goes farther along in my image, it stays the same width, but pictures of meteors that I’ve seen show that the smoke spreads out quite rapidly. I’m not sure how to do this.
“Smoke+fire” does indeed emit together, you want the “fire” option. How much smoke decaying fire produces is controlled by the “smoke” value on the domain (under “smoke flames”). Crank that up until the desired effect is achieved. You can manually type in values as large as 8.0, 4.0 is a soft limit. You can also adjust the relative densities of the smoke and fire volume shaders to help make the smoke more prominent.
Adjust vorticity and burn speed will do a lot. Larger flames have more room to curl and billow, so the speed and amount of movement in the plume is the main way to suggest scale. You said "For example, the smoke in my image looks relatively smooth, and the bumps are all pretty large which makes the smoke look small. " which makes me think you already picked up on this one. If you have a turbulence field or similar, you can increase the size there as well. Finally, the high-resolution “strength” field adjust how much the plume is “fluffed up” vs “smoothed out”. A high strength value gives a more ragged looking plume.
Actual pictures of meteors, or other’s artistic depictions? Real meteor smoke doesn’t really spread at all until the wind starts diffusing it, it’s very much like a jet contrail. If you want to mimic the look others have given meteor smoke, try using fields (like force and turbulence) to push the smoke apart. Annoyingly, Blender’s smoke sim lacks a direct diffusion control for this, so you’ll need to make do with forces.
You might not have enough subframes, can’t tell for sure.
I rendered a simulation with:
Subframes: 2
Divisions: 32
Smoke High Resolution Divisions: 5
and this is the outcome:
The smoke and fire in this image seem very smooth and undetailed, which is not exactly fitting for a meteor, but thank you for the input. You are probably right that 256 divisions is way to high, but I think that 32 is too low.
And here is the material of the domain:
