After seeing the awesome post by @Mederic I thought I wanted to try it for myself because those were some nice smoke puffs! I’m pretty much using his shader straight up so props to him! Here’s some results:
Here’s the shader:
I had no idea there was an Atmospheric Light node before reading the post by @NateLane, thanks for showing it!
I’m not quite happy with how the generated front or back map looked, so for this one I cheated and rendered out separate light maps for those directions just to try the functionality. I don’t have any pyro information, so it’s just a puff of smoke so far. I think the shading looks better than any normal map based shading I’ve used before.
All this made me realize I really need to brush up on the old linear algebra and vector math and how powerful it can be 
I’ll try to incorporate this into my explosion next.