In my latest piece:

Biera - Fantasy Archer

I started with a canned atmosphere preset in the standard mode that had fog gathered around their feet, and when I switched to volumetric it went away and I was unable to recreate it with any of the fog settings I tried.

I almost always render in volumetric atmospheres as I prefer what it does with the rest of the image, but is 'low and close to camera gathering fog' simply unrealistic or not possible with the volumetric algorithms, or has anyone managed to tweak things to get it to happen outside of standard atmosphere mode?

The attached image shows what I mean by low gathering fog - a render done with that precanned standard mode atmosphere.

Truth has no value without backing by unfounded belief.
Renderosity Gallery

i used a stone object with white smoke as material to get the same effect in the attached render. Atmosphere was set to volumetric, and with the material settings one can easily adjust the thickness of the fog. Wim

The problem there is that it puts it on the surface of the object. You can sort of tell there is a hollow space in the middle of your fog and that it ends abruptly rather than flowing back into the background and fading into the atmosphere.

Truth has no value without backing by unfounded belief.
Renderosity Gallery

Yeah, that is true, but it was the only way i could think of to restrict the fog to the waterflow. by adding an otherlayer of less dense smoke on top of it one can simulate the fading into the atmosphere.