Alpine A110 Berlinette

Current status:


Hey there,

so here’s a new project for you.
I’ve always wanted to do a classic car and a few days ago I decided to go for the Alpine A110 Berlinette that I fell in love with. It’s because its beauty isn’t that obvious, but rather unintuitive. The silhouette never looked right to me, but there’s just something about it that makes it look striking. I also love the concept of lightness and small engines, which this car represents like no other, being made of fiberglass and weighing only 750kg(!) in its road version and under 700kg in race specs. It also has a great history in rally racing. And although I don’t know much about rally I know that besides the Stratos or the Quattro this is one of the most iconic rally cars ever.

So it should be an awesome project, not only for modelling, but also for texturing and materials, as I want to make a few renders with it driving on dirt roads and doing some jumps. Should be a lot of fun.
I will most likely not make an interiour that’s as detailed as that in the MX-5, as it really is the part that takes longest. So just exteriour renders, but I wanna get them to be as nice as possible. I’ll go for a rally spec type of exteriour, so decals, mudflaps and lights all 'round.

This is how far I’ve gotten so far (after about 6-8 hours of modelling):




So that was the easy part :). Next will be bumpers, lights and all those exteriour chrome bits and details.

I hope you like this new project! If there’s anyone with more knowledge about rally than me please give me some hints if you see some mistakes :confused:

Hey there,

yeha, and here’s the first render. With headlighs and bumpers.


The inside looks a bit shiny, but that’s just the fresnel reflection. More coming soon!

wow, you are going fast! nice light setup!

Looking very good!

Enviado desde mi Nexus 5 mediante Tapatalk

You call this easy? My car has just 724 faces and I’ve already thought how to texture it, but your car seems to have much more faces. And you call that easy. If that’s really easy then I’m more amateur that i thought.


Thanks a lot for the replies!

Yes, I’ve quite a lot of free time at the moment, so I can work on this project quite a lot. The lighting setup is actually just a pro lighting skies demo from Blender Guru, but it indeed is perfect for some quick ligting like this here.

I see your point :). But don’t worry, at one point my cars looked no other than yours, it’s just that over time you learn quite a lot of different techniques on how to get the models more detailed while using a lot less time. With my Alpine for example, I didn’t actually model all of the verts you see on the picture, instead I modelled the car out on a less detailed scale, then put a subdivision modifier on it, applyed it and then worked on a more detailed level with the added geometry. I found this to be the best and fastest way to model a car like this with many details on different scales. And the more often you do it, the easier it is. This might be my 15th car or so and at some point it’s just routine. Good luck with your car, I think I will have a look at your thread…

Hey there,

I had a bit of a rethink. The more I dive into researching for the A110, the more I realized how important it is to actually know what version of the car I actually wanted to do, because there are millions! I found out I was doing a very late one, about 1976 or so, with the 1300cc engine. I already had modelled some rims when I found out that they were never used in rally. And so I sat down, looked for some pictures and finaly agreed on one version that I actually wanted to do: a 1972-73 1800 group 4 rally car. A few pictures here:




As you can see, there are some differences to what I started to model. Including:

  • much wider fender flares
  • different (older) door handle
  • grille in the front is moved up by quite a bit
  • changes in the headlights
  • quite a lot of detail/material changes.

So i did not use the rims that I had already modelled, here a picture of them:


(a pity I can’t use it, but I was just a bit too quick with deciding which rim I wanted to model)
(Maybe I’ll do the 1300 afterwards and use the rims for that)

but instead modified the bodywork, which took quite a lot of time already. This is the current status:



The changes should already be visible. Now everything should be a bit more straight forward. The rubber still looks a bit freaky here and there, but that should be a quick change.

Wow! That looks really nice Alpine! Nothing to critique so far!

Hey there,

small update, just a few detail changes i wanted to share:


I added the grille and numberplate in the front, modelled the doorhandle, a lot of screws and did some slight modifications to the bodywork.

Hope you like the progress.

Looking really good!! Love these curvy lines on bodywork. Waiting for you to add chassis.
Can you tell/show how did you make headlights? I tried to make ones in past but couldn’t achieve such good resulsts.

Thanks. So that’s how I did them:

I basically tried to cheat as little as possible, to get a good result. I looked at some reference images, and even though it’s really hard to see how the glass lenses are textured, I came up with something that I thought might be quite close to the real thing:


So just the texture modelled out flat. Then I rendered it out and in compositing I took the camera z-value to get some sort of “bump map” to later put onto the lenses on the car.

Then I modelled out a rudimentary type of headlamp:


with the lightbulb in the middle having an emission material and the rest being a mirror to reflect the light.

The material for the lens includes a refraction node with some roughness so that the light from inside the lamps can be scattered. I didn’t use glass because it blocks light from coming in, instead I mixed the refraction node with a transparency node via the “Is Camera Ray” light path input. I also used some volume shaders to creade a sort of yellowish color that old glass has.

The finished results look something like this:


And honestly, while it is a good try it’s still far away from what the real headlamps look like, like in the reference pics I showed you a few posts up. For now it’s alright, but if I come up with a good idea for how to make this look better, you’ll hear from me. Or if anyone knows a better way, be free to post it here too. Now that I look at it, a higher colour depth for the bump would be a starting point…

What IconW has done with his 250GT looks pretty good, but I believe he used an already existent texture and I wanted it to be as close to original as possible.

This looks really cool so far. I’m impressed by the details you’ve added so fast.
Did you have blueprints of some sort or did you just model it freehand from the references you found?
If you used blueprints, where’d you get them?

Thank’s for reply!! Actually it was very helpfull for me. Keep up the good work.

I always use blueprints, it saves a lot of time and effort to get the proportions right so that it looks good at the end.
I don’t have a fixed source where I get them, it’s mostly googling for e.g. “Alpine A110 blueprints” and picking the best I can find. Especially for older cars I recommend downloading a few different ones, because normally they are not very accurate. Then I compare them by blending them over each other (with the background images tool in Blender) and use the blueprint that seems to be more accurate for that part of the car. Or maybe I can entirely sort out one blueprint this way.

Thanks! The tip with blending over multiple blueprints is very useful for me. Inaccuracy is the problem I keep running inwhen searching for blueprints.

Your modeling skills are really impressive. I am currently working g on a Volvo p1800 and struggling a lot with the different types and inaccurate blueprints. Much harder than expected!

Thanks, awesome to hear from you, too!
That problem with the blueprints was one I learned the hard way. A few years ago, when I was still modelling only with very few reference images, I started with an Aston Martin DB5. It was only at the finishing touches that I saw how off my model actually was from the reference images I downloaded for the details. The blueprint that I used did actually look alright and was quite accurate in itself, but it didn’t have much in common with the real car. I have always wanted to redo it since but never came to do it again. That only shows how important reference is and that you should never trust only one source.

Oh and by the way: Servus aus München! I just realized where you are from while looking at your Home Office thread :D.

Thanks to everyone for all the great comments! Really helps me stay motivated and put a lot of work in this project. Hearing that you like it is a great thing.