And the final render:
I came up with this basic idea while in a Blender slump, inspired by the Idiots Fighting Things subreddit. I thought it would be funny conceptually to joust a fridge and lose. Then, thinking of heraldry a knight would have, to use energy drink companies. I originally used Monster for the main knight, but when drawing the Redbull heraldry, realized I needed to pivot.
For framing, I decided to bring the camera low and with a fish eye focal length. I wanted to give a sense of a tourney being like a music festival, which in my experience, means mud and alcohol.
There was an exceptional amount of shading work involved, especially in the foreground elements to get the right level of realism. I also used geometry nodes to create the rope and pennants element, which was a great learning opportunity. I was playing with that element the most for framing, so it was great that it was procedural.
Here’s the viewport render and some other detail/texture details because they’re hard to fully appreciate in the final piece:
