According to the “element life and death” technique of finite element method, with ANSYS parametric design language (APDL), we simulated the effects of long edge reciprocating scanning method, short edge reciprocating scanning method and direction orthogonal changing in different layers reciprocating scanning method to thermal-stress couple field and residual stress distribution during whole laser metal deposition shaping (LMDS) process. The dynamic regularities of thermal stress, temperature and residual stress distribution under different scanning methods are studied in detail. With the same process parameters, the samples fabricated by LMDS show good agreement with the simulation results.