Question Referencing a canvas from a prefab

Hi, I am quite new to Unity and I am currently working on a 2d dungeon crawler, similar to binding of isaac. I followed Blackthornprod's tutorial on making a health system

), but ran into trouble. I am using a prefab for my player , which means that I can't drag the heart images representing the player's health from my canvas (which is part of my hierarchy) into my 'hearts' array (located on my player prefab). Is there a way around this via script or Unity itself? I'll attach the code below! Thanks for your help.

Code (CSharp):

1. using System.Collections;
2. using System.Collections.Generic;
3. using UnityEngine;
4. using UnityEngine.UI;
5.  
6. public class PlayerHealth : MonoBehaviour
7. {
8.     public int health;
9.     public int numOfHearts;
10.  
11.  
12.  
13.     public Image[] hearts;
14.     public Sprite fullHeart;
15.     public Sprite emptyHeart;
16.  
17.     private void Update()
18.     {
19.         if(health > numOfHearts)
20.         {
21.             health = numOfHearts;
22.         }
23.        
24.         for (int i = 0; i < hearts.Length; i++)
25.         {
26.             if (i < health)
27.             {
28.                 hearts[i].sprite = fullHeart;
29.             }
30.             else
31.             {
32.                 hearts[i].sprite = emptyHeart;
33.             }
34.             if (i < numOfHearts)
35.             {
36.                 hearts[i].enabled = true;
37.             }
38.             else
39.             {
40.                 hearts[i].enabled = false;
41.             }
42.         }
43.     }
44.  
45.  
46.  
47.  
48.  
49. }

 

After you instantiate the player prefab, you should just have to set the hearts then. Whatever instantiates the player will be the place where you assign the hearts, and it would just pass along the values to the player prefab after instantiation. Alternately, you could just make the hearts part of your prefab. You can make UI prefabs just like anything else, so you can do it.