I had big problems making a icosahedron (20 equal triangles) for the D20. When I finally came up with one (after about 2 hours modeling and calculating), I found a built in plug in that made it in a click! :(

Anyway, I used rounder to auto bevel some smooth corners for the dice (since it was to be viewed in close up).

I then made some fonts and had to manually rotate and place them around the dice. This should usually not be a big problem, but because of the odd angles it was! I think it took about 2 hours. When finished setting up the fonts I solid drilled them into the dice and beveled them softly into the dice. I also had to clean up a lot of crossing polys making visual flaws.

The texturing was made by making a brass like surface (low diffuse, high specularity, low glossiness, medium reflection) and bumping it to make variations. Two procedurals were added to all channels, with various strength to enhance the effect and make dust and scratch.

The texturing of the numbers was made in a similar way, but with the main difference that I added crust (dots) on bump, and made a gradient on color, affected by bump (making those coloring uneven dots that usually becomes visible with closeups).

This one was a simpel very thin, rounded box with a planar image applied on it.

The image was made by making an improvised sheet in Excel, printing it out, filling out the text with a pen and finally scanning it back to jpeg. Be awarem, the sheet is not role-playing accurate at all. It's only there for making a natural surrounding. I haven't played a pen'n'paper RPG in at least 15 years! :D

To make the paper more alive I added some stains on it overlaying the image. The first layer is a small turbulence to make natural variations. The second one's some sort of larger turbulence stain, like coffee or something. These layers are applied to all channels, but toned down to be more natural.

The cola is a basic cylinder, beveled into shape step by step. Since it's only there for making natural reflections in the background I only roughly modeled it.

The texture is a cylindrical applied UV image, simply made in Photoshop with fonts.

To make it worn and by recycling (?) I added various layers of procedurals on all channels and turned down the reflections. The reelections are also blurred to be more natural.

The table is a 1 poly flat box with a image from Richard (CGTextures) applied on it for basic coloring.

To make it more personal I added some long and small layers on all channels. Especially on bump. Unfortunately it's too close to see those details on the final render. But they are there! :)

I set up the scene with cloned cans in front of and behind the camera to make natural reflections to the dice. I've only used two area light instead of multiple lights + global illumination, simply to reduce the heavy rendering time (30hours with the effects I first wanted).

Since I didn't use spotlight or falloff I added some black fog in the background to simulate the effect (the two circles) and hide the empty background.

I first started with real Depth of field, to blur out the areas not in focus. But that multiplied the rendering times to much, so I used the fake "Depth of field blur" instead for a simliar effect (reduced with AA though).

For the final render I used a medium low AA, but more AS instead (0.03) and used the perspective camera to get the option of oversampling it (0.5) instead. ~6 hours later it was ready.