Safely deleting a child of a prefab

Question

This is with Unity 4.1.3f3

I have a prefab with multiple child objects. One of those objects needs to be deleted. Selecting the child object, right-clicking, and selecting "Delete" does nothing.

I can "re-create" the prefab without this child object by pulling it into the scene, deleting the child object in the scene hierarchy, deleting the prefab in the project view, then re-creating the prefab by pulling it from the scene.

However, this breaks all Inspector links referencing this game object, so it's not OK.

How can I safely delete a child object of a prefab, with "safe" defined as "not breaking inspector links"?

Answer 1

Best Answer

Answer by whydoidoit · Jun 15, 2013 at 07:41 AM

Put the prefab in a scene, delete the child object, select the prefab instance in the hierarchy and click "Apply".

Note that indeed, even after you "break the prefab instance", the "Select" "Revert" "Apply" buttons DO STILL APPEAR. Strange but true.

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screen shot 2013-06-15 at 08.40.56.png (11.3 kB)

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Ted-Brown · Jun 17, 2013 at 05:27 PM 2

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Oh wow. That... that is terrible UI design on Unity's part. =) Deleting a child object in a scene breaks the connection to the prefab, so the natural expectation is that "apply" would no longer work, because there is no connection!

However, this worked perfectly. Thank you!

pea · Nov 11, 2013 at 09:37 AM 0

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Whoa, yeah. Teeeeerrible UI. Glad to read that you can actually do this though!

Demonicdaron · Aug 10, 2015 at 02:01 PM 0

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Just to confirm the UI bug, and to confirm the correctness of @whydoidoit 's answer

ovrdb · Sep 22, 2015 at 04:14 PM 0

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Really bad and misleading, Unity... but thanks for the info! It works!

Fattie · Nov 28, 2015 at 06:29 PM 0

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It has to be one of the weirdest things in Unity. I clicked "Reward User" and you should too! :)

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Safely deleting a child of a prefab

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