Blender pissing me off again. Sometimes baking of soft body works fine sometimes not and there is no foolproof method to fix it so it works correctly all the time. You just have to be lucky for this to work. I was baking my soft bodies whole night only to discover in the morning that some of them were baked properly, some of them not and some of them were not baked at all. In this video
In this video i will show you only 10 % of all plants that i have in the scene because if i would show you all i will not be able to play it in the preview. So look how crazy they were baked and there is no reason for this because i am sure everything is setup properly (you can see all my settings for the particles and animated plant with a soft body that i baked)
Apart of that i have another problem that after baking some of the plants becomed too small (and its not because of the size randomization or Length selected in the vertex group). So everything is absolutely crazy.
The same problem i had when i was making my previous underwater animation. But, thanks god, small plants at least didnt jump crazy from side to side they just didnt sway when the big plants did so i decided to render it anyways and its ok. But in my new animation i want all the plants to sway-
So i noticed that the more different soft bodies and particles on the scene, the more problems it brings and the bakes intersecting and dont work properly.
In such cases, often, i found that only thing that can help me is to start everything from scratch. But, you know, its counterproductive and i would rather start to learn Maya maybe because i am working with complex nature animations all the time so i need this to work fast, smoothly and seamlessly
It looks like you used Force Fields to animate soft bodies.
Then, you used hair particles to instance these soft bodies.
But Force Fields were probably not suppressed or deactivated after soft bodies baking.
Erratic movement seems to be hair particles one, still animated by force fields. But on their own layer, soft bodies are looking fine.