As an emerging technique for surface smoothing, solution deposition planarization (SDP) has recently drawn more attention on the fabrication of the second generation high temperature superconducting (2G-HTS) tapes. In our work, a number of amorphous oxide layers were deposited on electro-polished or mirror-rolled metallic substrates by chemical solution route. Topography evolution of surface defects on these two types of metallic substrates was thoroughly investigated by atomic force microscopy (AFM). It was showed that root mean square roughness values (at 50 x 50 mu m(2) scanning scale) on both rough substrates reduced to similar to 5 nm after coating with SDP-layer. The smoothing effect was mainly attributed to decrease of the depth at grain boundary grooving on the electro-polished metallic substrate. On the mirror-rolled metallic substrates, the amplitude and frequency of the height fluctuation perpendicular to the rolling direction were gradually reduced as depositing more numbers of SDP-layer. A high J(c) value of 4.17 MA cm(-2) (at 77 K, s.f.) was achieved on a full stack of YBCO/CeO2/IBAD-MgO/SDP-layer/C276 sample. This study enhanced understanding of the topography evolution on the surface defects covered by the SDP-layer, and demonstrated a low-cost route for fabricating IBAD-MgO based YBCO templates with a simplified architecture. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.