I was watching a tutorial on Youtube yesterday, I think they were using version 5. Included in the effects palette was Splotchy effect and Spot effect.
How can I add those effects in AS7, or are they in a different place and I just have not stumbled on them yet?
those effects were dropped from AS6 and AS7. you can use image texture to do the same thing. to make a custom texture you make your shapes the way you want, no stroke applied to the shapes, over the default background. apply the soft edge effect to the shapes and adjust the alpha to about 75. click on the fill color in the style palette to bring up the color channel info to adjust alpha. hit ctr+r to preview render and use the save as option to save as a png. image. now you can use the image texture effect with the png you made on your shapes. its' not as easy to change the effect as it was with spot and splotchy option, but you can make several variations of color, blur radius and alpha settings pngs. to get the effect you want. if you have photoshop, alot of the brushes make good image texture effects on shapes.
if you click on one of the shapes selgin sent you you will see that where it says effect 1 and effect 2 in the style palette, effect 1 will not be named but if you click on the button on the right of it, all the parameters for the effect are there and can be adjusted like all the other effects.
Awesome! Keep me posted. I went through all of Mark Bremmer's tutorials (multiple times) as well as "Cartoon Zack's" videos. Learned a lot. I would gladly pay for your hard work and knowledge. Let me know.