Abstract This study is part of the ongoing research at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of Brescia on FEM simulations of cutting operations. In recent years, the application of finite element method (FEM) to cutting operations has proved to be effective to study the cutting process and chip formation. In particular, the simulation results can be used as a practical tool both by researchers and machine and tool makers to design new tools and to optimize the cutting process. Several papers are available on two-dimensional simulation of cutting process because the three-dimensional versions of FEM software required a big effort in computational time. The present work aims to simulate three-dimensional cutting operations. In particular orthogonal cutting and oblique cutting operations are modeled. The FEM software used for this study is DEFORM 3D. The simulation results are compared with simulations and experimental data found in literature. A good agreement has been found, confirming the ability of simulations in predicting chip flow in cutting processes.