Halftone pattern on select areas only

[Danopoly4]

Hi everyone, thanks to those for attempting to answer this mystery for me, I greatly appreciate it.

The technique I'm trying to figure out is how to do what appears to be a circular halftone pattern on select areas of a dot grid.

From the image below, you can see that it is a grid of dots, but certain areas have larger dots compared to the others.

The technique that got me the closest so far is to have a gradient mesh and color halftone, but the dots still end up too close to each other or too 'blotchy'.

If anybody has advice I'm all ears, please and thank you!

[Ray Yorkshire]

Guess if you made a gradient,  not too dark,  just light and mediun grays,  so the resulting dots would  would be more spaced out after

running the  Colur Haltone effect

Then Object > Rasterize , and Image Trace  the result with ignore white- under advanced - selected

Best way is plug-in by Astute Graphics  called Phantasm,  using it's half tone tool, it's not so cheap

But the result is  vector ,

or

Online you can use Rasterbator ( free/donation)

https://rasterbator.net/

For example

A4 size, one sheet, and to get space around each  circle  set  Raster sixe, to something like 0-72 , as above

Then save as a vector PDF

Open that  in illustrator.

[mjbelt]

Another option:

Illustrator file (pattern fill) was imported into Photoshop,

and a combination of blending modes, and gradient masks applied
to layers to create this effect.

[Myra Ferguson]

Here's a previous discussion on creating a halftone pattern that might help How to create this? Probably need to use halftone pattern

TL;DR Probably use Astute Graphics Phantasm plugin or Photoshop