How to make "quite" realistic pine-tree?

Hello everybody,
I’ve been studying treegeenrators for Blender, i.e. Lsystem and Gen3, for several days.
I’m making in Blender an architectural model where I will insert some trees and more precisely old pine-trees, now the problem is to make these pine-trees.

Reading several posts inside BAforum about tree and treegen I’ve noticed many questions, I hope this thread might be helpful to the Blender community.

Making several attempts I found that the most suitable treegen is maybe Lsystem. Looking at one of the many pine-trees (bot. Pinus Pinea), so popular in Rome (where I live), it’s evident that its framework is due to the high number of prunings by man, therefore I wonder whether it’s possible to use treegens, made to reproduce the natural and random effect, for such artificial work.

http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/2765/pino2je2.th.jpg

http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/1117/pino4yv6.th.jpg

I also realized that the top ends of the branch majority belong, more or less, to the same horizontal plane, or more precisely, to a very flatted dome. Could you please help me and tell me which Lsystem parameters I should set in order to achieve this result?

http://img529.imageshack.us/img529/4643/pino3kh9.th.jpg

http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/7856/pino5mg2.th.jpg

Another awesome problem is the foliage. I tried to reproduce a group of needles using an object made of several edges all welded in a single vertex with a wire material assigned, but inside the lsystem.blend the render do not show this kind of material. Then I tried using particle system (learned with the Imperitor tut, thanks) above a small face, but in the render I see just the plane emitting, what’s wrong?
Below the setting I used to make a young pine-tree (I need an old pine-tree) with needles using particle systems
http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/2885/lpinogiovane2yd2.th.jpg

Do you have suggestions in order to have a quite realistic soft foliage?
Please, answer me also if you have other advice about some other treegens and realitve settings.

Thanks in advance

hmm… when you said pine I thought of a ponderosa, (native here in oregon), but these are much different.

note how one company did ponerosas:
http://www.plants4games.com/index.php?item=tr8

your pines are the opposite, upward slanting cones might work.
another method is cards,

note also the method this guy used:
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/211997/SID/231827/blFP/1

modelling and textureing is easier then generating and using particles.

another option is xfrog (google it, cool program, free for 30 days)