The porous models are of light weight and excellent composite mechanical, thermal, and magnetic properties. They are expected to break through the traditional design limit, to obtain mechanical parts with excellent comprehensive performance, and to meet the extreme physical performance pursuit of advanced industrial products. In recent years, the development and maturity of additive manufacturing technology have boosted the industrial applications of porous models, playing a unique and outstanding industrial role in aerospace components, medical devices, and other important equipment or instruments. This review focused on the design method of porous model, and described the related work from two aspects: the forward design method of porous model via geometric modeling and the reverse design method of porous model via topology optimization. In case of the former, the porous model modeling methods were discussed, such as discrete voxel representation, continuous parameter representation, continuous implicit representation, others and mixed representation, while the latter was expounded on in terms of the optimization design methods of porous microstructure units and the overall porous model structures, as well as the trend of porous model design from these two aspects.