As a computer science student, I am currently researching algorithms for mapping between pairs of shapes, particularly in the context of animation. I am interested in understanding how Blender implements shape mapping algorithms to facilitate animation workflows. Could someone please provide guidance on where I can find in the Blender source code the specific parts related to using maps between pairs of shapes for animation purposes?
I don’t think Blender has any algorithms that would commonly be called “shape mapping” in graphics software or research papers. And the papers that do use this terminology don’t seem particularly related to animation. So it’s not clear what you are looking for.
There is advice for navigating the code here:
https://developer.blender.org/docs/handbook/new_developers/navigate_code/
But maybe the first thing would be to find the functionality in the user manual, and then find the matching code for that.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/
The one thing I can think of is the interpolation feature in Grease Pencil. With it, users can create in-between keyframes from two other keyframes. It does support mapping between drawings that have different number of points, but it hardly does anything clever to accomplish that.
You can find the source code here: blender/source/blender/editors/gpencil_legacy/gpencil_interpolate.cc.