I should have thought of this earlier... Here are the files I've use for this tutorial:
http://www.andrei313.com/ga/nm_dice.rar
The textures have been resized to 256 so that the file will be smaller.
You can see how everything is made and also test if you can display normal maps in the viewport. The problem is that it is saved as a max file and will only work with 3dsmax8. I'll try to see how I can make this work with other versions as well.