For the past 30 years, positive gunite carving has been used to create environments for hotels, museums, zoo enclosures, and other larger sites. While it has a good appearance from a distance, few installations look natural when viewed from close proximity. Skilled gunite artists are required to make this process look more natural, which adds to its cost. Water flowing over these installations helps hide their cosmetic imperfections; the greater the water flow, the less noticeable the imperfections.

Gunite installations can be given a more natural appearance by mixing that process with manufactured field panels. Most often these panels are molded from natural rock. While field panels are an excellent choice for covering larger areas, they require a great deal of labor to provide the look of three-dimensional rocks. To create three-dimensional rocks, cutting, piecing, lathing and cementing of field panels is needed to join them together, and this requires a significant amount of labor. Some companies, such as Larsen Rock and Water, achieve attractive installations using this technique. This system is cost prohibitive for smaller residential and commercial projects.

Landscape Architect Mark Landsfield in Tucson, Arizona agrees, "It took me a long time to appreciate man-made rock. The concept that manufactured rock would look better was hard for me to believe, but as I compared the completed products, the results have been obvious. In my opinion, manufactured rock provides far more consistent installations and the design quality is much more predictable than natural rock."

Frank Struker, Principal of Living Desert Design, a Tucson-based landscape construction firm, also remarks, "Too often what is intended to look like an outcropping for a natural rock waterfall ends up looking like a pile of stacked rocks that is cemented together. For our water feature work, we rely on manufactured rock because it looks more realistic. We also save time because we only have to sell the landscape design once. With natural rock, we have to sell our concept and then resell it again after installation... natural rock waterfalls lack the consistency that the man-made product provides."

Daniel Cantrell, Vice President of Plano, Texas-based Contractor Stone explains, "The best application for natural rock is when strenuous structural requirements must be met." He adds, "Manufactured rock can be used in almost any application where natural rock is used as long as an appropriate sub-grade base or core is properly created for the product."