Irrlicht Engine

Hi, I was working on a project based off of the irrilicht\newton tutorial and I had it compiling and running just fine. I started a set of modifications and when i try to run now I get an Access violation writing location 0x81d15a3a when doing this:

IAnimatedMesh *mesh = smgr->getMesh("data/smallcube.3ds");
ISceneNode *node= smgr->addAnimatedMeshSceneNode(mesh);
node->setMaterialTexture(0, driver->getTexture("data/crate.jpg"));

When i step into setMaterialTexture, the violation happens on the line accented below:

void setMaterialTexture(u32 textureLayer, video::ITexture* texture)
{
if (textureLayer>= video::MATERIAL_MAX_TEXTURES)
return;

for (u32 i=0; i<getMaterialCount(); ++i)********
getMaterial(i).Textures[textureLayer] = texture;
}

I have worked in java for many years and am comming back to c++
The function pointer is on that line, i hit step into and it throws the access violation. From looking on the net, access violation most commonly is caused by trying to use a null object. The only thing I can gather is the getMaterialCount function is causing it. The material shows as created in the console output. Any ideas as to what might have happened?

Apparently this was caused by me having a animated mesh with no texture elsewhere in the code.