Image to illustrate the ‘complexity’ of the problem
I have 4 (or any number greater than 2) objects in a hierarchy. I make a prefab of this hierarchy. How can I access Sphere and Cyl in the project view. Currently it seems the only option is to instantiate one, change it in scene view, then apply and delete (simple but tedious, especially if it needs doing to many objects).
Note: This is not a nested prefab, I have only ONE prefab, it is not prefab-within-a-prefab it just has children and grandchildren; Cyl does not go into any other prefabs, nor willl I want it to. Does this still fall under the heading of nested prefabs? (A feature that was on the wishlist Two and a half years ago)
Hmm yea , i always wondered about that too , as long as i have used Unity , it only ever shows the Top Two nesteds… always have to drag and drop to the heirarchy to work any lower.
On a related note the search bar in the project window doesn’t search inside prefabs either. So using your example, searching for Block would not return a result.
Consider Prefabs a useful, but quite flawed, concept. They work great in the simple case, but in complex constructs (where they would be most useful) they tend to be wonky at the best of times.
You can’t mess with the those child objects in the prefabs directly. Why? Who knows! But drag it out into the Hierarchy and then modify as needed. Then use the Prefab: Apply to set the prefab back to the new-and-improved version, then delete the one from the Hierarchy.
And just a heads up… if you try to nest prefabs, you’ll really run into problems. Updating a core prefab that’s nested in other prefabs won’t affect those other prefabs. That’s because it doesn’t really nest prefabs internally, just copies them I guess.
The version notes in 3.5 do mention that prefabs have been redesigned internally with an eye towards allowing nested prefabs in the future. This is a killer feature, to be sure. And would address probably THE major pain point in Unity.
Having said that, there are tools that kind of help with prefabs (like Merlin’s Prefab Lab in the Asset Store), but in our case we’ve had to make custom tools to update nested prefabs. Though it’s one click to do, the tool is not generic, and requires a lot of special casing as we develop our game out. Bla!
FYI, those of us that put our votes towards nested prefabs on Unity Feedback received a little email a couple of days ago … saying the nested prefabs development was under way! So it is coming.