Anyone else find it frustrating that prefabs ALWAYS select the top parent object when clicked?

There are so many use cases that I can think of for using prefabs inside of prefabs, but it becomes a nightmare because clicking a prefab will always select the top-most parent prefab, making this setup almost totally unusable in a scene.

Currently we have 2 options to the left of the hierarchy where we can set objects to be unclickable and invisible. Would it be possible to get an option to make it so a parent object isn't auto selected when child assets are clicked on?

I would love to break my scenes into many prefabs housing other prefabs, it would be less accident prone, and greatly reduce file size saving the scene over and over, but i can't transition to prefabs because selecting things and making changes quickly is very important.

 

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SelectionBaseAttribute.html

 

If you keep clicking you can cycle through all the possibly selectable things at that point in the scene view, I mean I think it would be slightly better if it started at the "leafmost" node, but it doesn't seem like a deal breaker to click a few extra times.

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I don't think this helps, because both the prefab parent and the prefab child are already marked as selection bases. The scene view still seems to pick the parent as the winner even if you have a selection base attribute on an object attached to the child.

 

Admittedly I've not used the attribute before as I just do as you mentioned, click multiple times until you reach what you're after.

And if what you say is the case, then that attribute sounds terrifically useless then.

 

It's kind of the right direction, but what i'm hoping to do is not set a singular object as a selection base, i'd like to be able to remove the highest ranking object as a selection base.

 

Sounds like an excellent use case for a custom editor script.

https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Selection.html

 

Ok, I just figured out a workaround, this is a lot easier than I thought...

All you have to do is ALT + click the "do not select" toggle next to the topmost asset. Normally this would not allow you to select all child assets as well, and auto toggle them, but by holding alt you can freeze selection of just the top asset.

I'll be spending the next hour or so setting up my scene and migrating purely to prefabs.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, but it looks like this is 100% doable with some basic scene management.

 

This is one of those "familiarity breeds contempt" things I think.

Would be good to have something like a wiki where power users can log little quality of life tricks like this and then it would be organized by categories.

Unity has plenty of little quirks that aren't always easy to discover so a community document like that would be handy.

If unity had some employees sitting around without enough work to do, maybe they could make a youtube series with like 30 second videos where a problem like this is described and then some tricks to get around the editor more efficiently are shown. Stuff like that is a good way to show that the team cares about user experience and it will breed customer loyalty.

Maya has a channel like this - and probably many other DCC's as well - and it's one of my go-to resources during those times when you got some down time and want little tips to make your work easier.

 

I have the opposite issue. I want to always select the prefab/top-parent, not the sub-objects... (sigh)