Anisotropic ductile fracture is of special importance for accurate modeling of failure in plastic forming of lightweight sheet metals. This research introduces a user-friendly approach to model loading direction effect on fracture limits of sheet metals. The approach is combined with a newly developed fracture criterion (DF2016) to illustrate anisotropic fracture in shear, uniaxial tension and plane strain tension as well as fracture under balanced biaxial tension. The anisotropic DF2016 criterion is applied to describe loading direction effect on the fracture limits of two sheet metals: 6k21 aluminum alloy and a steel sheet of DP980. The predicted loading direction effect is observed to agree with the experimental results with high accuracy. The applications demonstrate that there are three advantages of the proposed approach: high accuracy, good flexibility and being very user-friendly in the calibration of anisotropic parameters. Therefore, we recommend the proposed anisotropic DF2016 criterion for numerical failure prediction in stamping of strong anisotropic metals. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.