Selective electron beam melting (SEBM) is one of the popular powder-bed additive manufacturing (AM) technologies, of which there have been extensive studies employing numerical simulations to investigate the thermo-physical phenomena. A procedure for deducing thermo-physical properties of powders from bulk properties of tantalum is presented. Realistic boundary conditions, such as the heat transfer between the printed solid and the surrounding powders, in together with realistic timing sequences, such as the time needed for cooling after complete of scanning of previous layer and the time for spreading another new layer, are incorporated in our modeling to mimic the real conditions in EBM process. The simulation provides understanding of how current tracks and layers interact with previous ones. We finally demonstrate the capability of our strategy by simulating a 2mm×2mm×10mm lattice structure with total 200 layers. Various layer-wise scanning strategies were designed and implemented to model the realistic fabrication process of celluar materials by exploiting the capability of model change and progressive element activation. Our simulation strategy is developed for EBM process of pure tantalum, but could be extended to other AM fabrication technologies and other metals without difficulties. The intertrack and interlayer information extracted from simulation is crucial for failure prediction and processing optimization of EBM and other AM process. We publicize all the data and codes via https://github.com/XJTU-Zhou-group/ABAQUS-Codes-for-AM-Process-of-Tantalum.