Modern dual‐phase (DP) steels are widely used in industry due to their favorable material behavior based on the complex microstructure. In the presented work, a microstructure based FEM model for the elasto‐plastic deformation of DP steels is developed in order to accomplish a deeper understanding of the structure‐property correlation. The underlying microstructure is obtained by serial section tomography. The following contribution deals with a comparison of different approaches to build a FE mesh, which is based on such microstructures. (© 2016 Wiley‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)