The last decade has brought significant advances in the constitutive modeling of metal plasticity at the continuum scale.  State of the art frameworks are capable of capturing first order phenomena such as texture anisotropy and monotonic hardening.  Today, their ever-improving fidelity also enables more complex predictions, including yield after multiple strain path changes and the evolution of Lankford coefficients during plastic flow.  These features are crucial for industrial applications, in particular the forming of metals which typically requires non-monotonic loads on anisotropic media.

This work presents a comparative study of modern constitutive frameworks.  It focuses on industrially relevant cases using the previous characterization of an aluminium alloy.  Distortional hardening models are compared to simpler isotropic and kinematic hardening in order to evaluate the gain of advanced methods with respect to their added computational cost.  Further efforts are made to provide a robust and transparent implementation, with a code-base made open and available online.