Sheet metals are often used in automotive and aerospace applications for safety-relevant components. Weight reduction is one possibility to reduce fuel consumption or increase the payload capacity and therewith reduce the carbondioxide emission of these trans-portation vehicles. The weight reduction can be achieved by using new sheet metal alloys and thereby reducing the sheet metals thickness. Advanced material process-ing technologies like for example the press hardening process to manufacture ultra high strength steels (UHSS) are an important contribution to weight reduction. Furthermore, the usage of many different sheet metal materials and grades, like the new generation of advanced high strength steels (AHSS) and aluminium alloys will replace further low strength steel components.To challenge the balance between safety and weight reduction, while maintaining safety, reliable and efficient engineering tools are needed. Finite Element (FE) simulations are commonly used to prove a maintained safety for parts with a decreased sheet thickness and weight. This leads to a high demand on the simulation precision of sheet metals, where an accurate prediction of the failure behaviour and the post-necking hardening of materials is needed. Therefore, an approach on material model calibration for modelling of sheet metal deformation and failure is developed. The ability for companies to predict the performance envelop of all these new sheet metal alloys and components is of great importance for the metal manufacturer as well as for the automotive industry.In this thesis work a method to characterize the elasto plastic post necking behaviour of sheet metal materials, the Stepwise Modelling Method (SMM), is presented. The method uses full field measurements of the deformation field on the surface of tensile specimen. The hardening relation is modelled as a piecewise linear relation in a step by step procedure. The linear hardening parameter is adapted to reduce the residual between experimental and calculated tensile forces. The SMM is used to characterize the post necking behaviour of a ferritic boron steel and the results are compared with the commonly used inverse modelling method. It is shown that the stepwise modelling method characterizes the true stress, true plastic strain relation in an effective and com-putational efficient way. Furthermore, the SMM is used to characterize the stress state evolution during tensile testing, which is an important factor for failure and fracture mod-elling. This method is shown in an aerospace application for the nickel based super alloy Alloy 718. A study on simulating the whole comments lifespan from blank to fractured component is presented by producing a laboratory scale UHSS-component and testing it until fracture. The component performance simulation is based on results obtained by SMM for paint baked fully hardened boron steel. To enable the post necking characterization of anisotropic sheet metals like aluminium alloys an updated SMM version based on an anisotropic plasticity model is presented and evaluated for the aluminium alloys AA6016 and AA5754. Finally, the fracture behaviour of an automotive 6000 series alu-minium alloy in different directions is presented. In this study a GISSMO failure model is calibrated based on full field measurements under different stress states and evaluated on a multi triaxiality tensile specimen.The results shown in this thesis are that the presented Stepwise Modelling Method is an effective and efficient alternative method to characterize the deformation and failure of sheet metals. Based on the results of this method plasticity and fracture models can be calibrated and used for advanced forming and component performance simulations. This can lead to reduce time and costs during the development processes of new materials and products.