Unity 3 takes issue with nested prefabs

I am creating a game that uses modular corridors to transition between levels, but every time I want to change something nested in my prefabs Unity returns and error like this.

GameObject name Pillar defined twice in building template replace map!
UnityEditorInternal.InternalEditorUtility:ProjectWindowDrag(HierarchyProperty, Boolean)
UnityEditor.DockArea:OnGUI()

e.g.

  1. I have a segment of my corridor that contains multiple pillars, in fact several of my corridor modules use this pillar.

N.B.
-The pillar is at this point a prefab consisting of a mesh collider and a mesh render.

  1. I have defined several corridors that use this pillar at various points, each corridor segment is also defined as a prefab.

  2. I have decided that I would rather use a box collider on the pillar, because otherwise the player gets stuck when touching certain parts of the pillar. So I replace the mesh collider with a box collider, which breaks the prefab connection– but no problem, I’ll just click the apply button.

  3. Now it all goes wrong, the pillar name turns blue indicating it is a prefab, but other occurrences of pillar are not updated, and pillar appears twice in the “replace map” causing the error, which I assume is a fancy internal thing.

Does anyone else experience this? Is there a work around?

There is no such thing as nested prefabs in Unity.
The top most object in the hierarchy thats made a prefab will be a prefab, all its childs will lose their relationships to other prefabs, they are now part of this new prefab (-> an object is never part of 2 prefabs at the same time, neither if its placed in the scene nor if its on the prefab itself)

That being the case, what approach should be taken to achieve consistency in a modular setting.

You can go here and express your need for this feature. Many others, including myself wold love if Unity supported nested prefabs

http://feedback.unity3d.com/forums/15792-unity/suggestions/332835-editor-nested-prefabs?ref=title

I’m facing similar problems between computers. I commit a version into svn, and update from another machine, this error comes up and the prefabs goes crazy.

I think it might be related to cache?

Using nested prefabs is now possible with this extension : http://u3d.as/content/bento-studio/nested-prefab/2Jz

That would be great if not: The requested URL /content/bento-studio/nested-prefab/2J was not found on this server. :frowning:

Sorry, url fixed.