Glad I'm surrounded by experts in composite area. I never worked on any animation composite, only still images. My main concern would be, once I have all the models done (cowboy, alien, the town, props, etc etc) and materials on, animation done, camera set..........................

................................. How am I going to export the whole thing into After Effects for composite each part?

Let say (my humble opinion), I want to separate the Cowboy (the whole animation) separate from the Alien and the Town so I can have a better control on the color correction, hue, saturation, contrast, etc... the same goes for the Alien and the Town.
Then combine the whole three pieces together.............

How would the pipeline work? OpenEXR?

I'm doing some research in this area and could only come up with some answers, but not really the entire process. I'm not looking for something that tells me press A then press B, then press C button. I'm trying to understand the basics and the overall process how this is done for later when I reach that phase. Never too early or too late for some investigation

I hope I can finish the sculpting by the end of this weekend, so I can start the painting process.

Oh and I'm running Quad Core i7

Cheers guys an thank you.