No that's a problem with the free riptide, it does not support the smoothing angle.
I will run it through poseray to get the phong back later.
TG2 requires an mtl file along with the obj file, to load an obj.
Riptide creates a .mtl file
So it's easy to test with because it's one step to TG2
I just use it for a quick test.
The full version does the smoothing but I'm cheap.