In this article, the process of sputtering and the behaviour of the sputtered atoms in a dc magnetron is studied by means of numerical simulations. The proposed model is a self-consistent approach, based on the particle-in-cell-Monte Carlo collision method. In this way, the process of sputtering is treated self-consistently with respect to the other processes in the magnetron plasma. The studied pressure range is 1-100 mtorr. The effects of the target-substrate distance and the choice of the scattering angle in the collisions between sputtered atoms and background gas atoms are also discussed.