Our aim is to develop a process that automatically defines a repertory of contiguous 3D protein structure fragments and can be used in homology modeling. We present here improvements to the method we introduced previously: the hybrid protein model (de Brevern and Hazout, THEOR: Chem. Acc., 106, 36-47, (2001)) The hybrid protein learns a non-redundant databank encoded in a structural alphabet composed of 16 Protein Blocks (PBs, de Brevern et al., Proteins, 41, 271-287, (2000)). Every local fold is learned by looking for the most similar pattern present in the hybrid protein and modifying it slightly. Finally each position corresponds to a cluster of similar 3D local folds.