In this paper, a meshfree shell adaptive procedure is developed for the applications in the sheet metal forming simulation. The meshfree shell formulation is based on the first-order shear deformable shell theory and utilizes the degenerated continuum and updated Lagrangian approach for the nonlinear analysis. For the sheet metal forming simulation, an h-type adaptivity based on the meshfree background cells is considered and a geometric error indicator is adopted. The enriched nodes in adaptivity are added to the centroids of the adaptive cells and their shape functions are computed using a first-order generalized meshfree (GMF) convex approximation. The GMF convex approximation provides a smooth and non-negative shape function that vanishes at the boundary, thus the enriched nodes have no influence outside the adapted cells and only the shape functions within the adaptive cells need to be re-computed. Based on this concept, a multi-level refinement procedure is developed which does not require the constraint equations to enforce the compatibility. With this approach the adaptive solution maintains the order of meshfree approximation with least computational cost. Two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method in the adaptive shell analysis.