I started in 3ds max with a basic box primitive and then using polygon modelling I created the chest, simple extrusion and some edge looping created the plank look on the outside of the box.
For the the gold coins I made a cylinder primitive and then squashed it. I placed a gold material on and then saved it as a vue object file or .vob, I then used a sand as a base material and added the gold coin as an eco-system instance.
The chest was covered in a wood material default to vue. However I did some modifications to the material which just a bitmap. I created a bump map in the function editor.