I think a lot of us would appreciate if Unreal Engine could do this without having to use particles and create ‘fake’ lens flares.
This is what it looks like:
I’ve seen a few posts of people asking how to do this, and most people use particle systems to fake the effect, so why not include native support for real anamorphic lens flares?
I think that would be really cool to see in a future release 
I didn’t try this but can we do something like this by importing a laser shard like texture into the textures instead of using standard bokeh ones in lens flares? Probably not but anyway it would be great if we have this effect.
Em, what the point of separate “feature” if you can just change texture to get exact same result?
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/732
Here is PR. If someone would like to take over it and finish implementation.
Hey Guys -
Thank you everyone for your input. We are looking at possible ways to improve and offer more options like anamorphic lens flare. Although I do want to give a shout out to iniside who did have a pull request in to add the effect it just needed a little more work on it to get it in line with our Rendering teams coding specifications.
The Anamorphic lens flare was not built into the engine as a default because of its special use case. While it has become more evident in recent years thanks in large part to Bad Robot, it is an effect that we want to be able to control the exact placement of at all times and not have every light on the scene generate this type of lens flare.
That being said I recently helped a user on Answerhub develop a Anamorphic Lens Flare based on the exact effect we used in the Infilitrator demo, you can find the sample effect and project here, Is it possible to share P_WeldSparks Particle System - FX - Unreal Engine Forums
Hey Eric, glad to see you guys are looking into this. The issue I’ve run into with using the particle, and which you can see in the last screenshot in the link, is the intersection with nearby meshes. I try to get around this by checking disable depth test in the materials editor, but then another problem arises: seeing the lensflare through walls. Do you have a solution for getting around this? Or should we just wait until its properly implemented in the engine? Thanks!
There are any news about the lens flare editor, or an easy way to achieve the anamorphic lens flare?
I’m probably dragging an old topic up from the grave, but if this makes any headway, I’d REALLY like a bloomstar/lens flare system where you can choose from an assortment of shapes, kind of like how SEGA’s Hedgehog Engine generates them, which is a really clear, and concise way of doing it. Basically, you simply assign a shape asset to a number in a slot, so you can cycle through them on the fly in the rendering pipeline’s debug mod. Anything from radial bloom, anamorphic lens flare, bokeh lens flare, 4/6/8-point bloomstars, to custom shapes of your own design were doable.