Before every aspiring 3D artist had a portfolio platform, people built their own galleries, hand-linked every image, joined web rings, and hoped somebody wandering through the science-fiction end of the Internet would find them. RAMA3D is still doing exactly that.
The site belongs to Norwegian computer consultant Espen Paulsen and describes itself plainly as a science-fiction 3D art site dedicated to Arthur C. Clarke. Its galleries are full of invented worlds, spacecraft, colonies, alien landscapes, planetary scenes, and images with titles like Inside RAMA, Artificial MantaRay, The Collector, Pathfinders, and Uranium Cargos.
Paulsen also invited visitors to submit their own science-fiction images for a guest gallery.
That makes RAMA3D more than one person’s portfolio. It is a surviving example of the old Web’s tiny, hand-curated art communities.
Bryce, Animation Master, Photoshop, repeat
Paulsen’s about page preserves the kind of technical detail that becomes useful with age. He lists Bryce for landscapes and environments, Animation Master 2000 for modeling, and Photoshop for final work.
Those tool names immediately date the workflow.
Today a science-fiction artist can publish a render to several giant platforms in seconds. RAMA3D came from a different culture: render the image locally, build an HTML page for it, write a caption, upload the files, trade links with other artists, and join subject-specific web rings.
The site even preserves a page for the Cool Science Fiction Webring, a reminder of how discovery worked before feeds became the front door to everything. A ring let independent websites point visitors toward one another without requiring a central social network.
Paulsen’s personal interests page is equally period-specific. Alongside science fiction, astronomy, electronics, golf, food, and skiing, he lists his professional specialties as Windows 2000, 2003, and XP deployment and migration. The portfolio and the biography were never separated into different brands. It was just his website.
That informality is part of the value.
RAMA3D preserves not only images but the surrounding culture of amateur CGI: the software, the fandom, the personal introductions, the external links, and the assumption that somebody somewhere would enjoy clicking through a homemade gallery of impossible planets.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list exists for sites like this because personal art pages are especially easy to lose once the software and communities around them move on.
The renders are old.
The enthusiasm survived at full resolution.