Further to last night’s viewing, I did a test involving a lattice made into a Soft Body, and applied a Turbulence field to it. The problem with this is that controlling the speed was pretty much impossible, and even after spending a good while tweaking the settings it was still very quick.
Fortunately a wonderful plug-in known simply as “Wobble” came to my rescue, with its super-intuitive parameters. It uses features that are already built into Maya (Sculpt Deformer, Perlin Noise) but collates them all on one convenient interface.
The effect is much more natural and much closer to what I would want. I don’t plan to use this extensively or with as great a “wobble” as this. I plan to just use it to give a bit more life to static shots. The best thing is, it doesn’t use any dynamics, so there’s no extra complication involving temperamental cache files and other such things.
Cell Shading 