Two types of bombardment experiments were performed. A first series on metallic spheres, examined by replicas, and a second series on thinned crystals, examined by transmission electron microscopy. The observations lead us to propose a model for the formation of the surface microrelief. This model enables one to correlate the observation of regular dislocation networks, due to the segregation in perfect loops of the induced point-defects, to the formation of the relief structure by a preferential sputtering mechanism.