Honestly what works best for me is using the same technique as AVC (with a few slight modifications)
In the real world, AVC os only restricted to yourself because you are changing your senses.
In a dream, anything you make, can be seen and experienced by everything in the dream because technically speaking the dream is still "you".

With that said, I always like to imagine what I am trying to make in my head(I always found thinking inside of a dream to be a simple irony) and try to picture it in your mind. Then imagine that, that thing is in front of you, (the key is confidence if you don't truly believe that you can make things in dreams, then it won't happen, unfortunately dreams can detect even the slightest lack of confidence in these things)

No you don't have to close your eyes, you can imagine it's behind a corner or just about anything that involves you not physically seeing this thing. It seems to make itore likely to appear once you round the corner or see it.

Now this is only till you can get good enough to just conjure things up right in front of your eyes. But hey, best of luck to you