Inside IMEE MADE's Honda Beat Widebody Project: Full-Car 3D Scanning with the EinScan HX

Published: May 8, 2024 | Updated: July 19, 2026

A widebody kit only fits right if the CAD underneath it actually matches the car. Not the car on paper. The actual, dented, decades-old sheet metal sitting in the shop. That's the problem IMEE MADE ran into with his Honda Beat, and it's why he swapped a hobby-grade 3D scanner for a professional one supplied by 3D Wonders, that is the EinScan HX.

• IMEE MADE, the car-mod and camper-build channel behind the IMEE MADE YouTube channel, used the EinScan HX (supplied by 3D Wonders) to fully digitize a Honda Beat kei car ahead of a custom widebody and front bumper build.

• He tested three tracking-marker methods. A 3D-printed "scanning net" and magnetic tracking pyramids both failed. Hand-placed markers, hundreds of them, were the only method that produced a clean scan.

• The final scan was capped at 10 million points and had window data stripped out, mainly to keep the file manageable on the workstation he had.

• Scanning ran in overlapping sections moving counterclockwise around the car, then merged into one aligned model in software.

• This is his second pass at the Beat with a scanner. His first project scanned the taillights with an entry-level unit; this one moved to hybrid blue laser and LED tech for the full exterior.

Who Is IMEE MADE?

IMEE MADE is a YouTube and Instagram creator known for car modification builds, camper van projects, and hands-on fabrication content, most of it built around a single, long-running Honda Beat kei car project. The channel's earlier work on the Beat included a custom LED taillight conversion that picked up enough attention (and enough comments about the red reverse lights) that IMEE MADE went back with a 3D scanner to design corrected reverse-light bezels. That project is documented on the IMEE MADE blog and used Creality's entry-level CR-Lizard scanner.

The widebody project picks up where that one left off. Same car, same shop, much higher stakes. Instead of a small bumper section, the goal is a full exterior digital twin accurate enough to design custom panels and a new front bumper in CAD.

Enter the realm of IMEE MADE, please meet Louis, an esteemed engineer renowned for his five-year tenure of popular DIY projects. His most successful project attracted 1.8M views on Youtube! Yet, in his pursuit, he has relied upon a hobbyist 3D scanner—until now.

 

In May 2024, we entrusted Louis with the Einscan HX, a professional 3D scanner that is widely used by businesses. Join us as we witness the transformation, as Louis elevates his craft to unprecedented heights with the precision and capabilities of our Einscan HX professional 3D scanner!

Please follow us and IMEE MADE! 

The Challenge: You Can't Design a Widebody Kit Around a Car You Haven't Actually Measured

A widebody kit lives or dies on fitment. Flares, panels, and a new front bumper all need to follow the real contour of the car, including whatever the Beat picked up over 30-plus years of sitting idle. Sketching that by eye, or working from stock CAD if it even exists for a kei car this old, isn't good enough for panels that need to line up with existing body lines.

The fix is to scan the car and reverse engineer the CAD from the scan data. That's a straightforward idea. Getting a clean, complete scan of an entire vehicle exterior is the hard part, and it's where most of this project's problems (and workarounds) show up.

Why the Upgrade to a Professional Scanner Mattered

IMEE MADE's earlier taillight project used an entry-level, markerless scanner. It worked fine for a single bumper section, but a full car body is a different job,  bigger surfaces, more reflective trim, more distance to cover without losing tracking. For this project, 3D Wonders supplied the EinScan HX, a professional-grade handheld scanner built around hybrid blue laser and LED light sources.

That hybrid design matters here specifically. The blue laser mode handles the Beat's darker and more reflective trim without the ambient-light sensitivity that trips up LED-only scanning, while the LED (Rapid Scan) mode covers large body panels quickly. It's the same hybrid approach SHINING 3D recommends specifically for automotive body and chassis work, which is exactly the use case here. 

EinScan HX Technical Specifications

Want the full spec sheet or a refurbished unit? 3D Wonders carries the EinScan HX and HX2 scanners directly.

Three Marker Methods IMEE MADE Tried, and Why Two of Them Failed

 

Marker-based scanning needs tracking targets the scanner can lock onto as it moves. Sticking hundreds of individual dots onto a whole car by hand is slow, so IMEE MADE tried to shortcut that step twice before landing on the method that actually worked.

The pattern here is a fairly common one in vehicle scanning. Anything that sits between the scanner and the surface, a net, a shortcut prop, tends to get scanned itself. Direct markers on the actual surface remain the most reliable method for full-body automotive scans, even when it's the least convenient one to set up.

The Scan Workflow: Sections, Point Caps, and Cutting the Windows

IMEE MADE scanned the Beat in overlapping sections, working counterclockwise around the vehicle so each pass had enough shared geometry with the last one to align cleanly later. Two practical limits shaped the process:

• Point cap: the scan was capped at 10 million points. More data isn't automatically better if the workstation processing it can't keep up, and a car body doesn't need more resolution than that to design accurate CAD panels from.

• Window removal: glass reflects and refracts scan data in ways that create noise rather than usable geometry, so window sections were stripped from the final dataset entirely.

Once all the sections were captured, they were merged in software through an alignment process, stitching the overlapping sections into one continuous 3D model of the car's exterior. That aligned mesh is the starting point for the CAD work ahead: the widebody flares and the new front bumper.

From Scan Data to a Buildable Widebody Kit

1. Capture the full exterior with a hybrid laser/LED scanner and physical tracking markers.

2. Align the overlapping sections into one clean mesh, with window data removed.

3. Reverse engineer the mesh into CAD surfaces, in software built for scan-to-CAD workflows.

4. Design the widebody panels and front bumper against that CAD, so the new parts follow the car's actual body lines instead of an assumed shape.

Step 3 is where a scan-to-CAD tool matters as much as the scanner. 3D Wonders' reverse engineering software lineup, including EXModel, is built specifically to take EinScan point cloud data and turn it into editable CAD surfaces, the exact next step after a scan like this one.

Get the Same Setup IMEE MADE Used

If you're staring down a reverse engineering project of your own, a fender, a full body, a legacy part with no CAD to speak of, note that the EinScan HX is being discontinued, so the EinScan Rigil and FreeScan Combo are built for exactly this instead.

The EinScan Rigil brings wireless tri-mode laser scanning at 0.04 mm accuracy with no laptop required, while FreeScan Combo brings 0.02 mm accuracy and marker-free scanning for dark or reflective surfaces, and both plug straight into scan-to-CAD software.

Shop the EinScan Rigil at 3D Wonders
Shop the FreeScan Combo at 3D Wonders
Not sure which scanner or software fits your project? Talk to the team about training.