Transform a huge artwork into smaller ones?

[Rares Molnar]

Hi everyone! I have a pretty tricky question.

Here is the context: recently I've just finished a huge artwork composition in Adobe Illustrator (6000px x 6000px) of a warship. The artwork is super complex and there are so many details which can be transformed into separate smaller artworks.

Question: Are there any possibilities of taking a huge artwork and delimiting some areas in order to obtain separate smaller compositions (maintaining the layers and the structure)? I mean the method should somehow eliminate the artwork outside my area of interest or make it invisible for rendering. I need this for an animation in After Effects. If I will try to import the 6000px x 6000ox original artwork, After Effects will definitely crash in no time. Long story short, from a huge artwork I want to create some smaller artworks maintaining the layers and the structure. Thank you in advance!  

[Mylenium]

You can create additional artboards and export them. And you're wrong about AE crashing right away due to the size. 5k and above is commonplace these days and will work just fine as long as you have sufficient RAM. It's more likely that the actual processing of the appearance would cause issues due to how vector rasterization works in AE or if you convert it to shape layers.

Mylenium