Testing with ocean shaders in Maya to create a cell membrane effect. This is very easy to create:

• Build a number of sphere’s within each other.
• Apply the default Maya ocean shader.
• Set desired color and transparency for each sphere.
• Important! Change the ‘wave size’ ocean shader property to create different animated effects for the texture of each sphere.
• Add the glow effect to one or all of the spheres.
• Use Mental Ray to render. Note, turn on reflections and final gather!