It is generally accepted that exercises which work a muscle through both concentric (lifting up) and eccentric (lowering down in control) produce the most muscle growth.
One may argue that isometrics produce as much muscle growth but this is hard to test.
However exercise alone won't cause significant** or visually noticeable muscle growth. One must either make every repetition count by using really slow tempos or heavy weights and explosivity or alternativelly it has been shown that even really light weights can build as much muscle has heavy weights, if every set is taken near failure.
If your maximum is 100 pounds for 1 repetition on a certain exercise, you can build muscle by doing a lot of repetitions with as little as 33 pounds, as long as you reach or go near muscular failure.
Muscle failure is not when it hurts, but when you can't lift the weight all the way up,even if you try ignoring the pain.
But doing hundreds of repetitions is boring, therefore I suggest the natural leg curl to build hamstrings, these are incredibly hard and few people in the world can actually manage to do the full repetitions, most can only do slow negatives.
Also pistol squats are a good option to begin for the quads.
As for calves, one leg calf raises with the foot hanging on stairs are excellent.