The ductile failure behavior of materials is of great relevance for the modeling of forming and cutting processes, as the stable process parameter range is strongly influenced by the maximum deformation up to failure. Many publications show that the failure behavior not only depends on the material but also on the loading conditions which differ from process to process. For the characterization of the ductile failure behavior of normalized AISI 1045 experiments and finite element simulations were performed to identify the influence of stress triaxiality, plastic strain rate and temperature on failure strain. For the validation of the analytically based failure model the results for a dynamically loaded shear specimen were compared for finite element simulation and experiment. The failure model developed shows a good description of the experimentally observed material response.